


The Hitman, the Bodyguard and the Billionaire

by Cards_Slash



Series: Harlequin Paperback Series [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - Bodyguard, Alternate Universe - Romance Novel, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-08-12
Packaged: 2019-05-16 05:37:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 34,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14805377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: When Steve Rogers was hired to protect the recently rescued Tony Stark, he thought the worse that could happen was being paid to protect a former weapon's manufacturer.  He was prepared to put his moral objections aside and suffer through the week because the money he was offered was too good to pass up.  Steve needed the money, and maybe a small favor from Stark, to finally escape his dark past.But he could never have predicted what would have happened, he could never have found himself being forced to make a choice between protecting his arrogant, charming new boss or letting his oldest friend finish the fatal job he was hired to do.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this story is meant to be written in the style of a Harlequin romance novel, if you are unfamiliar with them, basically any skinny paperback romance is the same.

Steve wasn’t looking for a big break, he was looking for a purpose. The very sort of purpose that made a sickly, skinny kid to take bus after bus to every recruitment office less than a day’s travel from the ugly little apartment he’d called home. The pursuit of purpose was a dangerous game; he’d learned that later than he would have liked to have. (But hindsight was 20/20 and Steve’s vision hadn’t been as crystal clear _then_ as it was _now_.) 

Here he was again, sitting in what passed for a waiting room for the agency, rubbing his palms together and thinking (again, not for the first, second or even third time), that maybe he should have invested some of the money from his last job to getting a professional looking suit. Steve didn’t make a lot of time for movies in his daily schedule but what he had managed to catch seemed to indicate that bodyguards should have a nice clean-cut suit. The best he’d managed was a clean pair of khakis and a shirt that he hadn’t accidentally put holes in. There was a ketchup stain on the cuff, but he was rarely inspected so closely that it should have been a point of concern. 

“I told her that you wouldn’t take this one,” Clint said. He was over by the filing cabinets, keeping up with the pretense of being an office. Pretense was important when you didn’t want anyone to have any reason to involve the authorities. Pretense allowed Steve to sit in a nice wood chair by the wall, listening to the sound of voices talking in the little office to the side. Pretense gave him an identity that wouldn’t draw unwanted attention, a decent paycheck, an excuse to let off some steam when the occasion called for it. Pretense was an office that was just a little too outdated to be considered _nice_ , the kind of place that anyone with money and alternatives would avoid as soon as they saw the front door. 

The sort of clients that made it through the door, well they weren’t usually the sort of people that would waste their time calling the authorities. Steve had made his peace with that, accepted the murky morality of working for people with enough money to pay his hourly fee. He had rules and he liked to think that Natasha respected those rules, that she hadn’t knowingly paired him up with too many criminals. (Call him old-fashioned, but Steve liked to believe that decent people deserved to be protected and indecent people deserved what was coming to them.) “She didn’t tell me anything.” 

Clint shrugged, pulled a file and flipped it open so he could look like he was doing something besides waiting for his next assignment. While most of them had other things to fill their time, Clint had ends that needed to meet and that meant he moonlighted as the agency secretary, opening and closing the files in case anyone came in looking for a man to protect them. “He’s rich,” Clint said to the file.

“She said she was raising my rate.”

“Your rate is too low,” Clint agreed. He flipped the file shut, slid it back into the cabinet and pushed the drawer shut. There were bandages on his fingers (God alone knew why) and a bruise on his jaw. But he crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the wall to take his time observing Steve. “You could be making a fortune. Is it true,” Clint’s voice was like an audible smirk, always quirking up at the edges when he happened across something he found funny, “that you traded a college kid two CDs and a candy bar in exchange for two days of your protection?”

“She had an asshole ex boyfriend,” Steve said. “What would you have done?”

Clint considered this and shrugged. “I don’t know. The same thing probably, but I wouldn’t have told Nat about it. She’s trying to build a brand. We can’t attract the right clientele if we’re giving away our services.”

“What’s the right clientele if it’s not people that need us?” 

“Rich people that need us,” Clint said. He had a sixth sense for danger (or so it seemed) because he rolled away from leaning on the wall to grab a file off the rickety, old desk and was doing a picture perfect job of being busy when the office door opened. 

Natasha had dressed up for success that morning, (a noticeable difference from her usual jeans and T-shirt), all the way down to her heels. “Steve,” she said warmly too him because whoever she was upselling in the room behind her was watching. But her body ducked forward, and it was just his and her face inches apart when she said, “don’t fuck this up, Rogers. Do this one for me, I promise I’ll find you Grandmas and college kids that need pro-bono work done.”

It was nice to have such a reliable reputation. Steve rolled his eyes and Natasha smiled with one arm out to guide him into the room as if he’d only just learned how to walk. He was rubbing his palms against his jeans, working out exactly how he wanted to introduce himself, taking in the sight of the man he was going to be assigned to protect for the foreseeable future. From behind, there wasn’t much to know about him—dark, stylishly messy hair, a nice suit that rendered most of his body someone non-descript. A very nice suit, the exact sort of suit that dripped money. It was a wonder that the whole space beneath the man wasn’t covered in gold coins—

“Mr. Stark,” Natasha said, “this is Steve Rogers.”

“Stark?” Steve repeated.

“I prefer to be call Tony.” There he was, the man all over the news. The man who had been kidnapped and presumed dead. The one that the government had been moaning over having lost, the one that conspiracy theorists had declared a spy, a defector. The one who had been rescued in a raid that was supposed to have cost the government millions. 

Why did Steve know how much it cost?

Because Tony Stark had stood at the head of a press conference with sunburn, bruises and split lip, looking like he’d only just barely escaped hell itself, and declared that Stark Industries would no longer manufacture weapons. The government and the stock market hadn’t taken too kindly to that sort of declaration; neither had the other men in charge at Stark Industries, judging by the non-stop damage control they had been doing on the news.

“Oh good,” Tony said after his hand had hung in the air a second too long, “you’ve heard of me.” He dropped his hand, let it slide into his pocket and stood there looking _amused_ about having his handshake stood up. “I was afraid this would be awkward. I can’t stand small talk, too many,” he shrugged to himself, “small words.”

Natasha’s hands were folded around the edges of her tablet, her smile was sharp as knives. (Steve had seen her knife collection, he’d watched her sharpen it, and he could see the silver of those blades reflecting in her perfectly polite smile.) “I’m sure he’s as surprised as I was,” she offered, “we rarely get clients as high profile.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed. That was it. He was just shocked about the caliber of their client. It was definitely the novelty of sharing space with a man worth billions that was giving him a moment’s pause. Not having to swallow the idea of spending his time protecting a war profiteer. Certainly, it had nothing to do with having risk his life to protect a man who had helped to kill _countless_ innocent bystanders. “It’s nice to meet you.” 

Tony was _amused_ by him, or confused and covering it with a smile. Either way he let his eyes linger on Steve a moment longer before turning his attention to Natasha. “Obviously I am aware that my reputation precedes me. Personal differences aside, I’d like some assurance that I’m getting the best possible protection you have to offer.”

“Steve is—”

“I’m right here,” Steve said. He didn’t care for Stark, and he didn’t have to care for him, but he knew how to do his job. “If you’ve got concerns about my professionalism, you can address them with me.”

“I have concerns about your professionalism,” Tony said. It was just hard to believe when he was _still_ smiling. “But I’m selfish, I like being alive and _free_. Money can buy a lot of things, but it can’t buy loyalty.” There was a scar on the very edge of his lip, a mark that nobody might have noticed if they weren’t staring at his face thinking unkind things they couldn’t say. “Someone’s trying to kill me.”

“Just one person?” Steve asked.

Tony’s smile lost it’s shine without ever changing at all. The amusement that had made it easy a moment ago was gone now. It was a dishonest man’s smile as Tony pulled his hands out of his pocket and crossed his arms over his chest instead. “As far as I know, yes. I’m sure Ms. Rushman will fill you in on the details.”

“Yes,” Natasha said. She flipped the tablet around and held out a pen, but Tony didn’t take it, he pulled one out of his pocket and signed his name on the contract without ever once touching the tablet. “I can assure you that Steve is capable of keeping you safe while the investigation is ongoing.” She offered Steve the tablet with that knife-sharp smile of hers, promising that as soon as they had a free moment she was going to speak very sternly and very quietly about the practical reasons that Steve had found himself employed here. 

“Well,” Tony said like it didn’t matter to him, “you can’t be a guarantee like that.”

“Let me walk you out,” Natasha said. She didn’t tell Steve to say exactly where he was, but he had the feeling that if he wasn’t waiting in her office when she returned things would be worse. He sighed as soon as she was out of the office and pulled a chair up to the desk to settle in for the inevitable.

Clint stuck his head into the office to offer a smile to match: “I told you that you wouldn’t like him.”

\--

Natasha came back like a concentrated natural disaster, breezing through the door without breaking anything but barking, “take a lunch, Clint,” with the full force of a category five ripping up the East Coast. The door to the office rattled hard on its hinges as she swung it shut behind her, and that left the two of them regarding one another. 

“You should have given me a heads up.”

“I’m your boss.” Her words were quick as a slap. She was his boss, and his protector, and it was in his best interest to remember exactly how invested she was in well-being. (Or, more accurately, how invested his well being was in her protection.) “This isn’t the kind of thing I plan on doing for the rest of my life _Rogers_. This isn’t a profession any sane person wants to be doing when they’re fifty. For that matter,” she finally moved away from the door to slap her hand down on the newspaper folded over on her desk. She pulled it up and flipped it over, so he was looking at Mr. Stark’s smug face smiling like he had exactly no cares in the whole damn world. “This is exactly the sort of person that can fix your problem. You,” she said in time with dropping the newspaper into his lap. She was leaning against the desk, aggressively taking up space between him and the desk so he didn’t get the mistaken impression that she was through being angry. “Need to utilize this moment. This man is in _need_ , and men like him are _never_ in need. You have something that he doesn’t have and if you play your cards right he’ll end up in your debt.”

“If I play them wrong, he’ll end up in the morgue,” Steve said.

Natasha had a particular way of looking at him, the one that conveyed how much she’d very much like to slap him. She never had, but it must have taken ever ounce of her considerable self-control to keep it in. “I understand why you feel invincible, Steve. I really do. But you aren’t invulnerable. Take it from someone that knows, it doesn’t matter how strong you think you’ve made yourself, the people that want to hurt you will always find a way.”

“Nat,” he said. He shifted forward, reached around her to drop the newspaper back on her desk. “I have to believe that everything happens for a reason, I have to believe there’s a better _reason_ for what—” He’d given up, for what he’d lost, for what he’d suffered through. “If it’s not to protect people that need it, the people that _really_ need it, then what reason is good enough?”

“He was kidnapped.”

“He was kidnapped because he was showboating in a warzone. He was there to demonstrate how good his weapons are at killing people, he was there to sell more bombs to men that don’t mind using them. The man is a genius, I’m sure understood risks.”

“He was tortured.”

Well, regardless of a man’s crimes, torture was never truly appropriate. Steve could accept that sometimes death was necessary, but he still didn’t like it. “I can’t do anything about that.”

Natasha stood up, sighing as she went around the desk to sit in her chair on the opposite side. There were files all over her desk, each of them filled with blank paper, doing their job at being a pretense of business they weren’t doing. “The man who was he believes had him kidnapped is still trying to kill him,” she picked up the tablet, tapped the screen a few times and then leaned forward to hand it to him. “His name is Obadiah Stane. He filed an injunction against Stark to lock him out of the company. Mr. Stark believes he is not only responsible for the kidnapping, but he is also the one responsible for selling Stark Industry weapons to terrorists. So, maybe you can balance your moral scale by protecting the _former_ war profiteer from the _current_ war-monger.”

Obadiah Stane had the face of man who had given away his soul. Steve had met enough men just like him to recognize the look in his eyes. It was like an extra twinkle, a little bit of fire and brimstone (if it wasn’t too melodramatic to say) that shone mirthlessly through. People who had never been on the wrong end of a tough situation labelled that little bit of extra sparkle as anything from godliness to good humor. Innocent people thought bad men had dead eyes, like a fish, but Steve would rather take his chances with a dead-eyed man than someone that smiled like Obadiah Stane. 

“Morals don’t work like that.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “At some point, Rogers. Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow, but at _some point_ you’re going to have to accept that your high horse is dead and you’re down in the shit with the rest of us now. But,” because they had already argued morals until they were screaming at one another, “I’d settle for some assurance that you’re willing to take this case—”

“I signed the contract.”

“And you’re willing to do your best. Signed the contract?” Her disbelief was delayed a beat, “I don’t believe, not for one second, that you give a shit about a contract. When it comes down to it, I need to know that you’re not going to be conveniently looking left while he gets shot in the head at a press conference. I _need_ you to promise me that you’ll set aside your personal feelings and handle this one like a professional.”

Steve wasn’t stupid enough to say something like _have I ever failed you before_. He just didn’t want to tell her that he would do his best, that he’d protect Mr. Stark to the best of his ability. That was just spite, and pettiness, it was just the old feeling of having been backed in a corner when he was still too little and weak to defend himself. “I’ll protect the _former_ war-profiteer.” It wasn’t exactly what she wanted to hear but she was going to accept it. “How long? When do I start? What is his present security detail like?”

“Until the investigation concludes,” Natasha said.

“The _police_ investigation?”

No. Natasha’s smile was civil, her fingers twitched on the table top, “please do not ask me questions that I can’t answer. The _investigation_ ,” she repeated. “He has a bodyguard who is mostly just for show, he contracts with other local agencies, but he’s looking for twenty-four-hour protection that’s a little more willing to get physical with possible threats than his current detail.”

“And that’s me?”

“You still only sleeping four hours a night?” (Yes.) “Still not going to those anger management meetings I told you about?” (He was not going because he did not have an anger management problem. He wasn’t angry without justification. He had plenty of good reasons to be pissed off.) “Well, then yes. That’s you. You’ll report to Stark’s home tomorrow at eleven, you’ll meet with his personal assistant Pepper Potts and she’ll fill you in on any more details. I’ll text you the address. Pack enough clothes for a week, maybe bring a bathing suit, he’s got a pool.”

Yeah. Right. _Perfect._

\--

Home was a one bedroom on the second floor with three of the four windows barred shut. The last window might not even have been made of glass, the panes were an ugly sort of orange-yellow color and they appeared to be held in place mostly by a generous layer of dirt that no amount of his careful scrubbing had loosened. The floors were squeaky, the walls got sticky in the heat, the air conditioning only worked every third day and the water sometimes came out rust colored. 

Steve’s neighbors were a revolving door of bad choices, a non-stop parade of persons that screamed at one another, played obnoxious movies, never paid their rent, jumped out the window to escape the police or in one unfortunate case, had arrived at the onset of a series of pet murders. After the first kid that moved in had turned out to be wanted in six states for assault charges, Steve had taken the precaution of never speaking to his neighbors. There was no conflict of interest as long as he knew nothing, and so all of them could go on living in apartments only just barely managing to escape being condemned.

Bucky liked to call their current style of living _mutually assured destruction_. He said it with a snicker in his voice, a little smirk on his face. It was like the cold war, but with dog killers and petty thieves.

But hey, at least they got a decent couch out of it. Steve had protested, and Bucky had insisted they take the couch left behind by a man they chose to assume was a drug dealer. He was the second fellow to jump out the west-facing window, the first one to break his ankle on the landing and still get away. They’d gone through the trouble to check it for drugs, weapons and other criminal offenses before they’d brought it into their apartment. 

Steve wanted to hate it on principle. But principle was the cold floor as the only other place to sit or sleep, and his back didn’t care much about standing on principle when it could be laying on luxury. So, the couch had become his bed. 

“I’m home,” he said after he’d manhandled the door open. The apartment answered him with an echoing silence, the eerie stillness of the early afternoon. All the criminals were napping (he supposed) in that golden hour before the afternoon reruns, and the arrival of the unfortunate children that lived on the third floor. There was a note on the fridge:

_Got a job thing, be home late._

Steve left the note and pulled the fridge open. It didn’t cough at him (for once), but it hadn’t managed to materialize any food either. Just a few dishes of leftovers that they were never going to eat. A pack of beer that Bucky insisted they keep in the fridge, but neither of them ever took the time to drink. There was half an onion, a bag of dried out carrots, and what may have been, at some point, two slices of pizza wrapped in foil. “I bet Stark’s eating tonight,” he said to the fridge. 

The fridge didn’t appear to have any comment on the matter beyond flickering the failing light on and off to warn him of imminent power failure. He pushed the door shut to yank open the freezer. It was a winter wonderland, with a layer of ice that was slowly threatening to crush the careless pile of microwave dinners they kept on hand. 

They didn’t have a microwave, but the oven worked as long as you didn’t require very much convenience to your convenient meals. Steve threw one in the oven to heat. 

The one bedroom their apartment boasted was only, by technicality, Bucky’s room. And only that because it was where they’d dropped the mattress they’d been using like a time-share before they got the couch. The rest of the room was unremarkable at first glance, just a few blue plastic bins stacked on top of one another with sagging lids. The closet door had never shut, so they’d taken it off the hinges and propped it up against the wall. Bucky’s clothes were folded and rolled, kept in the bottom of the closet in drawers they’d taken from a dresser left out by the trash. Steve’s clothes were folded into neat squares, organized by color and type on the top shelf. There were empty hangers pushed to the end of the closet. 

“This is my only good shirt,” Steve said to the closet. The rest of them were sufficient when his only goal was to not be naked, but none of them approached the quality that Mr. Stark most likely expected from his staff. (This had become his life, in a very, very short time, worrying about what he could wear to a billionaire’s house.) It was short work picking the best of a mediocre lot. They kept the bags in the front closet, hanging off wire hangers above the locked black trunk. Nothing screamed _I’m hiding secrets_ like a locking trunk, but short on ideas, money and better alternatives, the trunk had been the best choice. 

All packed, with only fifty more minutes before his dinner would be ready, Steve went to take a shower. 

\--

Bucky came home when Steve was searching through the utensil drawer for the good fork. “Meatloaf?”

Steve shrugged, dipped sideways to pull the box back out of the trash and held it up for him to read. After a few weeks, all oven dinners reached point where it was impossible to tell if they had ever had different flavors. “I thought you were working.”

Bucky did not wear hoodies and jeans when he went to _work_. He certainly didn’t come home with clean hands and loose ponytails keeping his hair out of his face. Those were not the aesthetic choices of a man who had been _doing his job_. Maybe the fashion of a man who had gone to the library to read erotica in the bathroom and took the long way home to pass the fruit vendor with the pretty girlfriend who sold them fruit for half off. (Because, Steve assumed, she thought they were boyfriends and neither of them had ever told her otherwise.) “Research,” Bucky said. He pulled open the freezer and shifted around the boxes. “How’d your interview go? Did you get the job?”

“It was an ambush, not an interview.” Steve finally found the good fork in the sink under breakfast dishes. “Natasha thinks if I do a good job, and make the rich man like me, he could help us out.”

Bucky pulled a knife out of his pocket to stab the film on the TV dinner. He yanked open the oven as he said, “help _you_ out.”

“ _Buck_.”

“So, what’s the job? How did she get you to agree to work for a rich guy? Is it Daddy Warbucks? Is he saving orphans?”

Steve moved his dinner from the stovetop to the card table. “Daddy Warbucks only saved the one orphan.” And with a name like _Warbucks_ , he couldn’t have been a very good man either. “I told you she didn’t ask. She informed me that I would be taking this case.” He just didn’t want to say it, he didn’t want to have to admit out loud who he was working for. “I have to go to his house tomorrow, so I’ll be gone early.”

“Who is it?” Bucky asked again.

“What about you?” They didn’t talk about Bucky’s clients. They didn’t talk about his job. They certainly didn’t bring up it up over disappointing dinners at their rickety kitchen table. “Is your—” (target), “business local?”

Bucky didn’t smile at him, he didn’t argue the point, he just said, “yes. It pays well, so if you manage not to piss off your client or be in the bathroom when he gets stabbed in the liver, maybe we can move out of this shithole and into a nicer shithole.”

It was important to have moderate, attainable goals. Steve peeled the film off the top of his dinner and regarded the contents. (Mr. Stark was most likely not eating overly processed food products that might not contain any actual food.) “It’s Tony Stark.”

“What?”

“My client. It’s Tony Stark.”

Bucky didn’t say anything; he didn’t even seem to understand what had been said. For a moment, he was just perfectly still, hands folded on the counter he was leaning against. His eyebrows furrowed and he tipped his head, as if hearing the words from a different direction would make them make _sense_. 

“Look,” Steve said, “I don’t need another lecture about how I need to make this work and—”

“The weapon’s manufacturer?” Bucky asked. “The billionaire that got kidnapped by the terrorists? That guy?”

“Yes.”

Bucky whistled at that, pushed himself away from the counter and slid his knife back into his pocket. He turned around to head toward his room and change. “I wouldn’t fuck this one up if I were you, Steve. For once, Natasha is right. If you do the right thing with this one—” He paused on his retreat to let the possibility of freedom from their current environment sink in, “—and I mean, guard his life, save it if necessary, from _whoever_ might want him dead. You’ll be set for life, Steve. Tony Stark has more power than we’ve ever had.” 

“That doesn’t make him a good guy,” Steve said. “I don’t need help from a man that got all that power by being the best at killing people who shouldn’t have had to die. Call me old fashioned, but I’m not so bad off that I’ll trade my integrity away for—”

Bucky stood there with his arms crossed over his chest. Bucky knew how the sentence ended; he knew exactly what Steve was willing to trade, and for what, he knew exactly how they’d ended up _here_ , hiding out in plain view. Taking jobs that no amount of childhood imagination could have dreamed up. Bucky had been in this with him since first grade, and he knew _everything_. “From where I’m standing,” in a dingy, slightly smelly, partially crumbling apartment, “it’s not being _old fashioned_. It’s being stupid. You’ve taken more help from worse people than Tony Stark. Don’t stand on principle, Steve. Do whatever the fuck you have to. Get out of this shit. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”

That was just cheating when Steve would have done anything for Bucky. “I’ll keep him alive.” That just meant _I’ll keep my options open_. It was never a bad thing to have options. 

“I’m taking a shower. Watch my dinner, wash that fork,” Bucky said before he slammed the bathroom door. It never quite closed all the way, but slamming it gave them the best chance of it _mostly_ closing. 

Steve sat back in his chair, sighing at his dinner, thinking about how he’d thought his life would go. It didn’t end here, with dinners made in factories making up the most of his diet. It didn’t end with unsavory propositions like protecting a man whose death he wouldn’t otherwise have taken a moment to care about. A man who smiled at him like they were going to be _swell_ friends and didn’t take it personally when his handshake went unanswered, the very sort of man that said things like _so you’ve heard of me_ as if he could tell exactly what Steve thought about him just from a glance.

Either Steve was transparent, or Stark was observant. One way or another, he needed to find a way to make this _work_ , not for himself or his own options, but for Bucky. He had to get Bucky _out_. Out of this apartment, out of this job, out of this country, out of this destructive cycle. Steve could stomach the prospect of protecting Tony Stark if it meant the possibility of _finally_ , really _saving_ Bucky.


	2. Chapter 2

Natasha had told him to arrive at Stark’s address at eleven. Setting aside the fact that the address she gave him required twenty minutes of planning and two and a half hours of actual travel, Steve arrived with his dimpled bag of meager essentials at ten-thirty-one. The address was not a house. It was a family owned bakery with a neon sign in the window that advertised hot-fresh-donuts. 

“You’re sure this is the right address?” Steve asked the cab driver. He was leaning forward in the backseat, fingers still clenched around the cab fare he didn’t want to part with. Through the windows, the building looked too shabby to be grouped together with his current employer. The neon in the window was the newest thing about it, and even that seemed reminiscent of the early eighties.

“I’m sure,” the driver said. He plucked the cash out of Steve’s fingers and resumed his busy task of impatiently waiting for his backseat to be free. “What do you want? This is the address you gave me, give me a different address or get out of the car. What are you afraid of?” This prompted an amused chuckle from the man, “donuts?”

Steve pushed open the door with more force than was necessary. He was barely on the other side of it, barely through swinging it shut when the cab took off. He stood there in his second best button down and the same pants he’d worn yesterday, looking up at the weathered sign announcing the return of fresh lemon donuts for the summer. 

There was no sign of Stark, or really of anyone except the staff that were sweeping up inside. It was him, a few cars and a woman with sunny red hair that was sitting with her legs crossed on a bench next to the front door. She had a tablet resting on her knee, a little brown sack sitting by her thigh and a coffee gripped in one hand. Impeccably dressed and impressively beautiful, she was easily out of place next to chipping paint and dusty windows. Even the sun seemed to bend to catch the perfect angle to highlight her hair. When she looked up, her mouth pulled up into an automatic smile. She was fluid in motion, rising to her feet with no sign of hesitation and just as easily, just as quickly she was standing in front of him. “You must be Steve Rogers.” She tucked the tablet under her arm to extend her hand to him.

“Uh, yeah.” He shook her hand with as much force as he felt was appropriate and she seemed disappointed by it. “You are?”

“I am Ms. Potts. _I_ felt it would be unwise to allow Mr. Stark to leave the house while there is at least one very real threat against his life. I’ve done some checking, I’m not thrilled with the legitimacy of your home office, but I am satisfied with your resume.” She turned back to pluck the little sack of donuts off the bench. “Is this the best you’ve got?”

Steve looked down at his clothes, feeling as shabby as the aging building, “yes.”

“I’ll have to be late,” she cleared her throat like a command before she stepped off the sidewalk and out into the parking lot. “I suppose the most important thing that you should be aware of is that this is not a typical threat. The man that is attempting to kill Tony has advanced weaponry.” 

“That Mr. Stark helped develop?”

Ms. Potts stopped with her fingertips on the handle of a car door. She was pulled to a complete stop, held in place with her back to him so there was no telling exactly what her face must have looked like as she took in the words. When she turned around to look at him fully, with her arms hugging the tablet to her chest, her smile was perfectly benign. “Allow me to be perfectly clear,” she said, “you are employed by Mr. Stark, and therefore to some extent by me. I manage Mr. Stark’s affairs, up to and _including_ his security detail. I was not informed he was reaching out to independent contractors, I was not allowed to meet you before you were hired. You are making a very poor first impression.”

“If the threat is advanced weaponry, I’m going to need to know as much as I can about it. If Mr. Stark helped to develop it, he can provide me with the information I need.”

Ms. Pott’s polite smile didn’t believe him for a single breath. “If Mr. Stark has seen the technology, he can tell you anything about it you would like to know. The second thing that would be important for you to remember is the people who love Mr. Stark are very protective of him.” And it would be best for Steve’s future if he were to remember that the man who led the strike team to save Mr. Stark was his best friend, and that there were no reported survivors of that raid. This woman smiled at him, but that made her no less of a threat. 

“Yes ma’am.”

Ms. Potts pulled the door open and said, “Happy,” sharp and loud. The car jostled as the man snoozing in the front seat jerked awake. She slid into the car, across the back seat and called, “get in, we need to update your wardrobe.”

\--

To say that Steve failed at first impressions would have been attempting to summarize the magnificence of the Grand Canyon as ‘kind of a big hole’. There had been worse immediate outcomes than being wholly ignored by a beautiful woman in the backseat of a luxury car. Half the kids that he’d gone to school with, for instance, had taken such offense at his abysmal manner of introducing himself that they had made a game out of seeing who could punch him the most over the course of a week. Ms. Potts wasn’t going to lower herself to punch him in the back while he wasn’t looking; but she had more power in her frown than the whole sum of bullies of his childhood had combined. 

Simply put, Steve’s best chance to save Bucky hinged on improving this woman’s estimation of his character. “Look,” he said when they’d reached a stopping point in a swamp of mid-morning traffic. “I didn’t mean to imply that Mr. Stark,” built weapons to get rich, “I didn’t mean to imply anything negative about Mr. Stark. I do need to understand the situation as best I can to be capable of protecting Mr. Stark from threats. If there’s a chance that his life is being threatened by technology that has not yet been made public—well, I’ll need to know how to disarm that technology.”

Ms. Potts looked at him without moving a single muscle in her face. She maintained a placid, expressionless (almost bored) look until he finished talking, and for a moment after too. “In my experience, there sorts of men in the world. The ones that do what they feel is right, regardless of the costs and the ones who do what they are paid to do. The second sort of man is dangerous when you can be outbid. The first sort of man is dangerous because he only serves himself. If I had to pick which sort of man I wanted protecting me, I would choose the second. At least you can reason with money.” 

(So much for second impressions.) The car slowed to a complete stop, the man in the front turned his head just far enough to say, “we’re here Ms. Potts.” She slid out of her side of the card without so much as a moment’s pause. That gave Steve a moment to regroup himself. “I’d quit while you were ahead,” the driver said. “Pepper isn’t going to like you no matter what you say. Not until she’s satisfied that Tony’s going to be safe.”

“It would be easier to do my job if I didn’t have to worry I was going to be fired,” Steve said.

“She won’t fire you. Tony hired you. Trust me,” he turned around in his seat and smiled, “she’s threatened to fire me every day since she started and here I am. I’m Happy, Tony’s driver, friend, previous bodyguard.”

“Previous?”

“Uh,” Happy said, “the threat’s a little more serious than an overeager reporter or a fanatic fanboy. It’s a little outside my area of expertise, if you will.” The smile didn’t leave his face, but it dampened on the edges, like a fire slowly settling to a smolder. “We’re counting on you.” The encouragement lacked complete sincerity, and it was interrupted by a sharp rap of knuckles on the car window. “Tony is,” Happy corrected, “you should get out.”

Out was three steps behind Ms. Potts all the way into a shop that smelled a bit like polish and a lot like fabric that cost more than his shithole apartment. Ms. Potts was greeted like returning royalty, not touched but handled with the air of embrace as she was guided to what appeared to be her usual resting spot. A man with wrinkles at the edges of his eyes and dull fingers looked up at him with his eyes narrowed in speculation. He stroked his chin. “Are we thinking pretty or practical?”

Ms. Potts had leaned forward to pull her shoes away from her bare feet. Her response was a scoff, and a knowing sort of smirk as she straightened back up on the little couch. “Both, of course. Pretty and tactical,” she said.

The man nodded. “Stand up straight, son.” (Steve was standing as straight as he could possibly stand.) But the man circled him like a shark, poking here and there when he found a part of Steve’s body that he felt was slouching. “How much time do I have?” the man asked.

“We’ll need to be seen in public in two days,” Ms. Potts said. “I’d like to take something today if that’s possible.”

“Mm,” the man said as he pulled a long measuring tape out of his pocket. “With shoulders like this? I might have something in stock that would fit him but it wouldn’t _fit_ him.” Then the man was running his hand down Steve’s body, from shoulder to waist, resting both of his hands on the waistband of Steve’s pants with complete and total authority. As if he had asked and been granted permission. “He’s incredible,” the man whispered mostly to himself. 

Ms. Potts rolled her eyes, “he’s a dorito.”

“Ah,” the man with his hands on Steve’s body without Steve’s permission said with the tone of a man who had put his hands all over any number of people without permission. “Mr. Stark does like a crunchy snack. Well,” he pulled his hands back and lifted the measuring tape like a weapon, “we should begin.”

Ms. Potts was too busy frowning over Mr. Stark’s snacking tastes to notice how close to punching the man Steve had been. She said, “Steve, this is Clarence. He does work for Mr. Stark.” 

“What sort of work?” And what sort of man planned to mix his _snacking_ with protecting his own life? (All stress on the word _planned_ because Steve was many things but he wasn't a snack for hire.)

“I make suits.” Clarence went behind him again. “Stay standing up straight, this shouldn’t take very long.” His thumbs were like whispers running the length of Steve’s shoulders. 

It wasn’t that there wasn’t more to ask, Steve had more questions now than when he had started, it was just that there didn’t seem to be a point in asking them. Ms. Potts had resolved to ignore the proceeding as if nothing at all unusual were happening. (Perhaps there wasn’t, perhaps Steve was too sensitive about being examined too closely.) Clarence, the tailor, had the look of a man who was paid too well to go off answering questions. Or maybe just the expression of a man who had already been asked every question a man could think up by all the men that had already stood exactly where Steve was standing. 

\--

“The basics are,” Ms. Potts said once she was satisfied that he _appeared_ refined enough convince someone that had never met him that he had class. They were on their way out, not bothering to pay for the services or goods they’d purchased, her hand against the door to push it open before he could manage it. “Well,” she said once they were outside, “ _basic._ You’ll be expected to stay with Mr. Stark when we are in public, you should not answer any questions about your employment including why you were hired, where you were hired from, how long you expect to be employed or your fee. If we leave the house, regardless of what Mr. Stark is wearing or what he says you can wear I expect that you will be wearing a suit. Ton— _Mr. Stark_ can dress how he chooses, you and I will dress our parts.” 

“Look pretty, don’t talk,” he said.

“And _keep him alive_ ,” Ms. Potts said with a brittle white grimace. Then she was walking again, “you’ll be provided with a room at the house. We consider the house to be the lowest security risk but that does not mean that it is safe.”

“Why is the house a low security risk? Wouldn’t it make the most sense to,” kill Tony, “make an attempt in private?”

Ms. Potts pulled the car door open and sighed, “Mr. Stark’s house is managed by a highly advanced, extremely loyal, and theoretically impossible to penetrate AI. His name is JARVIS. Please be polite to him, Mr. Stark doesn’t appreciate people that are rude to the house.” She slid into car, saying, “home, Happy,” all in the same breath. 

Steve got into the car feeling very much like an afterthought.

“Do you have a weapon?” Ms. Potts asked.

“What?”

“A weapon?” Ms. Potts repeated, “a gun, a knife, a _baton_ , do you have a weapon with you right now?”

No. Weapons were too easy to put to use; guns simplified murder to a transaction requiring no more involvement than one finger squeezing a trigger. They were detached, and surgical, incapable of the sort of discrimination necessary to know the difference between an innocent man and a guilty one. Guns didn’t care who they killed, knives couldn’t reassess their attack. (And bombs, well, bombs were—) “No.”

Ms. Potts didn’t seem to know how to feel about that, rather than attempting to provide him with any more information she just looked down at her tablet. “Happy, turn the music on please,” as if the addition of easy listening favorites would make the drive less awkward.

\--

_Nothing_ could have prepared Steve for the reality of Tony Stark’s mansion. Not the photograph he’d seen in passing, not his meager underwhelming attempts to imagine the sort of luxury a _billion_ dollars could purchase, not even his spiteful jealousy could have cooked up the humbling sensation of standing in (what he assumed was still referred to as) the driveway. The cliffside was a sheer drop straight into waves. The smell of the water was as bright as the sun slanting across the sky. 

The building itself was white, stone and steel and glass. It had curves where other buildings had hard lines, and—

“Come on,” Ms. Potts said. “Happy will get your things. I have to deliver you and get to work, I didn’t anticipate being delayed as long as I have been.” She moved too quickly to appreciate the awe of the building from the outside. He had to give up gawking to get in the door before it closed behind her. 

Immediately inside, a voice seemed to turn the very air around them an alarming red color. Ms. Potts pressed her perfect finger against a clear panel on the wall. Under her touch it flickered blue and produced letters that hadn’t existed a moment before. She tapped in a code and said, “JARVIS, this is Steve Rogers. He is a probationary member of our security personal.”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Rogers,” JARVIS said. The voice didn’t come from the panel on the wall, exactly, or any speaker he could see, but seemed to echo out of the air itself. It spoke in a friendly, human voice—different than any computer Steve had ever seen before. 

“Call me Steve,” he said.

JARVIS didn’t take the time to confirm the command, but moved on smoothly to, “should I inform Mr. Stark that you have arrived?”

“Yes, please,” Ms. Potts said. She cleared her throat to draw Steve’s open-mouthed staring away from the _size_ of the room they were standing in. “Allow me to show you to your room. If you get turned around, JARVIS will be able to assist you in finding the correct room.” She traveled through the house as if she had lived there herself from many years, guiding him up stairs and through hallways until she paused in front of a bedroom that might have been _small_ by the standards of this house but felt as if it were easily as large as his entire apartment. “This is where you’ll sleep.”

“Ms. Potts, Mr. Stark requested that you leave the new employee in the kitchen and he will be up as soon as he is able to break away.”

Ms. Potts drew a breath in. Her smile was strained to the point of snapping. She said, “JARVIS, help Steve find the kitchen. Show him how to use the appliances. If you’ll excuse me,” she said. (That was nice, in its own way, to know that it wasn’t _him_ personally that had offended her so much.) 

Steve looked around his room, at the bed, the nightstand, the closet and the dresser. There was entire window made of glass, facing outward in a way that made it less than an ideal view of the ocean beyond. It wasn’t a _bad_ view, so much as an incomplete one. (Still better than the view of a rusted out pool that his current apartment afforded him.) “JARVIS,” Steve said, “where’s the kitchen?”

\--

Happy walked in while JARVIS was in the middle of detailing the many functions of the stove. Steve would have been happy to make bitter comments about how well he knew how to cook (for instance, how he knew to put the frozen dinners into the oven, and leave them there, but to come back before they burnt) but there were no knobs on the stovetop. There were no dials on the oven. Hell, there was no heat on the stove top when he rested his hand against it (at the urging of JARVIS). 

“This feature utilizes induction heating—” JARVIS had the voice of a friend and mentor. The exact quality of voice of a loved one. Even when half of what he was saying wasn’t entirely relevant (the complete list of pros and cons of gas vs. electric vs. induction for instance) just the sound of his voice was a welcome distraction from how out of place Steve felt trying to blend in with all this overt wealth.

“Ah,” Happy said when he came into the kitchen. He pulled open the fridge to pull out a soda for himself and plucked a water bottle out to offer to Steve. (It was difficult to guess why he wasn’t offered a soda, and better not to jump to any conclusions.) “You got sent on the kitchen tour. I think he’s got it, JARVIS.”

“Of course, sir.”

Steve unscrewed the cap of the water bottle and took a drink. “What should I infer about my welcome from being sent on the kitchen tour?”

Happy shrugged. “It’s the longest tutorial in the house. Did you know,” he tapped his knuckle against the ice maker and made it blink to life, “that this can make sixty-one different types of ice? Did you know there were sixty-one different sorts of ice?”

“I just know the one,” he said. That kind was _frozen_. 

“It’s not you,” Happy said. “Pepper sends people here to keep them busy when she has to exchange words with Tony. JARVIS won’t let you leave until he finishes the one hundred and three safety rule briefing. Knives are sharp,” Happy said. “Hot water can scald.” He motioned them toward the exit with a jerk of his head. “Come on, let me show you the best part.”

“I’m not sure you can top the induction heating cooktop,” Steve said.

“I bet I can.” Happy guided him through the house to a set of doors that opened to a breezy balcony. There was a pool shimmering in the not-so-distant distance and all around them the simple, breath-taking beauty of waves under the cliffs. 

It was almost stomach turning, standing so close to the rail he could look over. To see _nothing_ but open air beneath them. The wind blew his hair away from his face, it dragged the smell of the water up-and-up until his head was filled with it. Salty, and damp, and warm rocks. 

“I’m sure you’ve already heard threats and speeches and rules.” Happy was squinting out at the sun. “I _know_ you’ve heard the news. Everyone has an opinion about Mr. Stark, about his company and what they do—but, not everybody actually knows him. I know Tony. I know he’s not the monster they make him out to be on the news. Someone tried to kill my friend. Someone is trying to kill my friend. You don’t have to like him, but I think you would if you tried.”

“It’s not important to me that I like someone. Nobody deserves to be,” assassinated? At least, they didn’t deserve it in this context. A few years ago, Steve might have said nobody ever deserved it in any circumstances, but that was a level of naivety that Steve couldn’t sustain. It had become a series of exceptions he was willing to make. “To be murdered.”

“It would make me feel better if you did like him,” Happy said. “Anyway, we should get back to the kitchen before Pepper comes looking for you.” And he guided them back through the house to the kitchen, where Ms. Potts was already waiting. She was white-cheeked and furious, with a charming smile sliding onto her face when they walked in.

“If you need anything while you’re here, Mr. Rogers, please call me.” He was opening his mouth to ask what her number was, “just ask JARVIS to place the call. I’ll do my best to provide anything you need. You’re welcome to explore most of the house, there are a few restricted areas, if you are heading into one, JARVIS will inform you. You may eat anything you find in the cabinets. If you want something that isn’t already in the house, please call me. Do not call for take-out for obvious reasons.”

“Of course.”

“Do you have any questions?”

No. Steve didn’t have anything resembling a question. He was too busy trying to process everything that he’d already been told. It was knocking around the interior of his skull, making discordant sounds that echoed out his ears again. “No, thank you. Is Mr. Stark—”

“Mr. Stark is presently in his lab. It is the most secure section of the building, he’s fine there. If someone does attempt to breech the perimeter without permission, JARVIS will alert you.” She stepped sideways just far enough to touch a blank glass on the wall. It flickered to life with flickering images of the house. “No matter where you are in the house, you are only inches away from one of these screens. If you cannot find them, JARVIS will activate the ones closest to you. He will also alert authorities.”

With a man like JARVIS on your side, it seemed almost redundant to hire a flesh and blood bodyguard. “Alright,” he said.

“We’re going to the office, Happy,” Ms. Potts said.

Steve was going to stay here. Taking up a very small amount of space in a very big house.

\--

Steve learned more from the briefing that Natasha sent him than he did from the people who had repeatedly asked him to protect their friend. She had found ‘probably the most accurate’ floor plan of the mansion, from the supporting structures to the roof and highlighted the areas more vulnerable to attack. Natasha never said things like, _if it were me_ when she explained how his clients were most likely to become successfully eliminated targets, but the implication was there in her every word. Nobody who hadn’t injected an IV line with air-bubbles could explain how easily it was done with such authority. Nobody who hadn’t selected the perfect window for sniper assassination could analyze and identify all the necessary factors with such accuracy.

Natasha had killed people, probably more people that Steve wanted to know about, and she might have still been killing people. That was another exception that Steve was willing to make because Natasha was providing him with what he needed more than he needed morals. 

There were only three weak points in the building—and even were only weak by the virtue of them giving the fastest possible route to frequently used rooms of the house. If an assassin managed to creep over the balcony, they would have the fastest route to Tony’s bedroom but even that route would alert JARVIS, even that route took them at least ninety seconds.

It was bad luck to be so at ease, but the chances that someone would attempt to kill Tony in this house were so slim they almost didn’t exist. So, he rifled through the cabinets in the kitchen until he found a box of pasta he was pretty sure he could successfully turn into food. 

“JARVIS, where’s the salt?”

“To your left, sir.” 

Steve sat at the table in the kitchen, eating plain pasta with a bit of pepper sprinkled on top, taking in the echoing quiet of the house. He hadn’t had much silence since he was a child. His choices had taken him through a series of busy rooms, and loud places, it had landed him in an apartment building where quiet wasn’t silence but the early afternoon when the only sound was the settling building and the unsettling sound of the bugs in the walls _crawling_. 

If he closed his eyes, and _concentrated_ , he could hear the house around him humming. He could hear the waves hit the cliff. But those were blank, static sounds, the kind of thing that blended in with the quiet to become an echoing quiet. 

“I don’t know if this—”

Steve snapped his eyes open to see Tony Stark standing there looking remarkably casual in jeans and a T-shirt stretched over his chest. His right hand was smudged with grease as he motioned at Steve’s dinner with one pointed finger, there was a lumpy bag of frozen peas hanging from his other fist. The damp spot on his shoulder seemed to have been the area he was attempting to ice. His lip was split, there was bruise forming on his cheek and possibly more under his clothes from how delicately he was holding himself up. 

“—is a choice? Maybe you like plain pasta, I don’t judge, but I made sure the fridges were stocked. Do you cook? I don’t know if you cook, some men don’t like to cook, there’s frozen dinners and,” he paused just long enough to remember what he wanted to say, “something called a meal in a box? I wouldn’t eat it, but it said everything was included.”

This was the man that was regarded as the foremost authority on weapons that won wars. This sleepy-eyed man babbling about all the food he had put in the cabinets. “The pasta is fine, Mr. Stark.”

Tony closed his mouth with the effect of a man who had never heard something so blatantly untrue in his whole life. He took that in, looked down at the peas in his hand and shuffled over to throw them in the trashcan. He washed his hands in the sink, hovered there while he dried them on a nice (pink-ish) towel before turning around to say, “ _really_?”

“Really?”

“Forgive me if it’s inappropriate, but that’s your body,” he said it like a laugh, “and _pasta_ is fine?”

(What was it the weird man with the touchy hands had said? That Mr. Stark liked a crunchy snack?) Steve nodded, “I have a great metabolism.” That was not even a lie. It was technically completely true. “If I shouldn’t eat—”

“Eat what you want,” Tony said. He went over to the fridge to pull it open and sorted through the overflowing contents until he emerged with a package of chicken wings. “I won’t offend you if I make something with flavor, will I?” He just looked so proud of himself when he said it. “More flavor than black pepper.”

“I put salt in the water.”

“My God,” Tony said, “if I’d known you’d won a Michelin Star I would have paid more.” 

Steve didn’t like to be insulted, he liked it even less when he knew it was an insult, but he didn’t know exactly what sort of insult it was. “Do you spend a lot of time cooking your own food?”

“No,” Tony said. He was pulling spices out of his cabinet, shaking them into the glass bowl he’d already gotten, “I rely on my extensive kitchen staff to feed me.” There was absolutely no hint in his voice that it was a _joke_ , but set against the empty house, there was no misinterpreting the sarcasm. “Sometimes I eat Burger King. They don’t pay me to, I just like the burgers.”

“So, you like to cook?”

Tony shrugged. “I like to eat good food. You sure you don’t want some of these?” (Here was a billionaire with spice dust on his fingertips, looking hopeful about sharing chicken wings. Here was a man that was _definitely_ going to drive Steve crazy.) “I have more.”

Steve sighed, “sure,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Tony assured him. “Grab me the other pack out of the fridge. You can eat it with your plain pasta. Maybe we’ll pour you a glass of milk if we're feeling adventurous.” He nodded when Steve set the pack of chicken on the counter next to him, like a nod was the same as a thank you. (Maybe rich people didn’t say thank you.) “So, how’d you make it to—twenty six? Twenty seven? Just tell me when I guess right, twenty eight? Ninety four? Come on, Steve, help me out.” Steve did not help him out; he crossed his arms over his chest and waited. “Your _age_ without learning to cook?”

“Lack of ambition, probably,” Steve said. 

Tony’s smirk was quick and sincere. “Well, if you can manage it, I’m going back down stairs after I get these in the oven. JARVIS will tell you what to do to finish them up.”

“Sure.” Steve was good with directions. 

“Just don’t wait on me to eat them. I might get distracted.” Tony made short work of getting the wings ready. He washed his hands and he left with a wave, taking a fresh pack of frozen vegetables with him as he went.


	3. Chapter 3

Day two, and there hadn’t been (as of yet), any actual guarding required from his bodyguarding position. What little security there was required in the house had been handled by JARVIS who had alerted Steve that someone had driven up to the driveway and been sent away.

“Thank you,” he’d said to the robot that was doing his job. 

“You’re welcome,” the robot answered. Steve was not entirely certain one could qualify JARVIS as a robot when he didn’t appear to have any single body. The voice was everywhere in the house, available on every surface that you passed, and capable of doing many different actions at the same time. He was _something_ but he wasn’t a robot. (That’s how necessary Steve was for this job, that he had could be replaced by a bodiless robot.) 

Steve walked the perimeter of the home for lack of anything else to do. The sort of luxury the house afforded should have disgusted any man who had ever had to chose utilities or food. It was an insult to people like Steve’s Mother who had worked seventy-hour weeks just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. (Steve’s Mother had worked herself to an early death, but here was Mr. Stark’s private gym complete with weights that had the shiny look of having never once been touched.) 

This view, and this house, were bought with money soaked in blood. Everything in the house was purchased at the cost of the lives Stark’s weapons had killed. 

It was more of a shock that there was only one credible threat against the man, than that someone would want to kill him. Steve had spent a day in his house, among all his needlessly luxurious things, and he had a strange tickling thought of wanting to kill him. (If Bucky where here, he would have scoffed at the thought, he would have rolled his eyes, he would have said: what rational man wants to murder another one after sleeping on a mattress like _that_? Nobody wakes up from a good night sleep and wants to kill someone.) 

Steve didn’t want to kill anyone, not really. He didn’t want to be another fine thing, purchased and set on display, with no intended use.

\--

The morning had dragged on forever, interrupted very suddenly by the ringing of a phone that seemed to come from everywhere all around him. “Where’s the phone?” he’d blurted out when the ringing had come from the table in front of him, the windows around him and the couch he’d been sitting on. The sound consolidated, joined by a vibrating bit of light, drawing his attention down to a square of space on the table he’d been thinking about resting his feet on. It was a picture of Ms. Potts’ face and a blinking green light inviting him to accept the call. 

“Nice of you to answer,” she said.

Steve was not going to admit he had no idea the table could be a phone. (Would any rational person expect a table to be a phone? He felt they wouldn’t.) “I’m sorry.”

Ms. Potts hummed her disapproval. “Happy is delivering your first suit today. Please put it on when it arrives.” She was on edge, distracted as she spoke to him. “Regardless of what Mr. Stark may try to say to you, do _not_ leave him.”

Steve wasn’t a genius but he had mastered first grade so he understood when he was being asked to add two and two together. “Whose coming?” 

The call did not show Ms. Potts face in real time (but it could) but he could _hear_ her trying to decide what she had to share in order for him to be effective. Steve understood secrets but he couldn’t do his _job_ without some facts. 

“Ms. Potts,” Steve said. “It would really help me be prepared if I had some idea who was coming to the house today and whether or not they are a threat to Mr. Stark.” (It would certainly help him to have some idea how to prepare himself. He was a great fan of weapons, but he would like to know if he should be ready to get shot at.

“Obadiah stopped by my office to inform me that he plans to check on Tony today.” Her voice was pure fury, white gritted teeth and tight frowns, overlaid with fear. “He smiled right at my face. He said he missed having Tony around the office.”

Steve said, “understood,” because it was what had always been asked of him. He understood what he was being told, he understood that the enemy was walking in through the front door. The rest was automatic; his body knew exactly what to do once it was engaged in a fight. 

(Wouldn’t the men that made this body be so proud of how easily Steve took to violence? Wouldn’t they just be tickled pink at the infinite applications their experiment had? If they had access to his findings, his observations? They would be besides themselves.) 

Ms. Potts sighed, “please protect Tony. You don’t have to like him, just do your job and we’ll make sure you’re taken care of.” 

“I’ll protect Mr. Stark,” he assured her. He put a bit of effort into it, he made it sound like he had any stake in it. He made it sound like it was the only thing a decent man would do. 

\--

Happy arrived twenty minutes after Steve finally figured out how to hang up the phone. He didn’t linger, but hand over the suit in it’s garment bag. He hesitated long enough to say, “Obadiah _is_ the man the media likes to say Tony is. He doesn’t care about anything but himself.”

Steve nodded. “Are you going back to Ms. Potts?”

Happy nodded. He didn’t say that it was because Mr. Stark had assigned him to do it, but it seemed obvious enough. (That or, maybe, there was a bit of a crush that Happy had on Ms. Potts. Either way the man’s divided loyalties were siding hard toward the pretty woman.) “Don’t let Mr. Stark talk you out of doing your job. He’s good at that.”

Steve wouldn’t know what Mr. Stark was good at because he hadn’t shared more than a dozen sentences with the man. He hadn’t even seen him since he came to the kitchen the night before. The food had been gone when Steve woke up the next morning but there was no _proof_ that it had been eaten. He had no proof that Mr. Stark was in the lab because he had no access to it and no way to see through the frosted glass that separated them. But he could hear sounds from inside, and JARVIS told him that’s where Mr. Stark was.

“JARVIS,” Steve said between watching Happy walk out the front door and starting for the stairs that led to his bedroom. “I need to know if anyone is approaching the exterior of the house. I need to know as soon as you know.”

“Of course, sir,” JARVIS answered. “Should ‘anyone’ include persons with security clearance?”

Steve stopped on the second-to-last stair to stare upward at the ceiling. (He had not yet figured out where JARVIS’s brain was contained, or where the speakers were hidden, and that left him with a false sense of JARVIS being constantly over his head.) It hadn’t occurred to him, before this moment, that there were even people with security clearance that could bypass the house’s alert system. It should have, since Pepper had walked in the day before, since Happy had arrived without any announcement. How many more people had been given an automatic all-clear? “Yes,” he said, “and I’ll need a complete list of persons with security clearance. Do you have a printer?”

“Of course, I have—”

“Great. Print that list for me. Tell me where to find it after I get dressed.” He pushed open the door to his room with more force than was necessary. JARVIS muttered a _yes, sir_ that almost sounded annoyed to be bossed about. (If a partially sentient house could be annoyed.) 

\--

The suit was like a hug, so perfectly tailored, so soft and so _nice_ that it gave the mistaken impression of an embrace. Steve had not spared a single second to look in the mirror to see how it _looked_. He had only slid his arms into the suit jacket and tested it to be sure it wouldn’t rip if he had to move suddenly. (What he meant, and refused to outright think, was if the suit would rip if he punched someone.) As nice as the suit was, his shoes were still the same dusty, old pair and they looked far-far-worse in comparison to his new wardrobe.

JARVIS had directed him to a printer in the kitchen (why) that had produced a list of people that had been granted various levels of clearance to the house. Almost all of the names were strangers, a few were names Natasha had included in the packet she’d sent with him, and right at the top, complete with security clearance, was the very man that Steve had been hired to protect Tony Stark from.

That was infuriating.

What sort of man knew who was trying to kill him, hired a man to protect him, and didn’t even bother to tell the house to lock the door if the alleged murderer came knocking on the door. The oversight (as Steve decided to think of it) was fatally stupid. It showed a lack of _care_ that was _staggering_. An ignorance that could only be born of pure arrogance; as if any man were really safe in his home. As if any man were really safe anywhere when he knew a man with the means, the money and the motivation to kill him was still out in the world. 

Steve was on the fifth (the _fifth_ ) page of persons with access to the house when the lab door pulled open from the inside. He looked up just in time to see Mr. Stark shout in surprise, to see the coffee cup he’d been holding fall out of his loose grip. It shattered on the ground, sending glass shards and steaming hot coffee flying in all directions. “Jesus,” Mr. Stark gasped, “what the hell are you—there’s a whole _house_.” 

Steve was going to explain that they were anticipating a visit from Obadiah Stane, and he was going to ask if they could temporarily reverse the security clearances on everyone on the list, but Mr. Stark was pushing the lab door shut before he could. 

“Look at this mess,” Mr. Stark said to himself as the door locks reengaged and the panel that had been momentarily clear frosted over again. 

“I need to talk to you,” Steve said as loudly as he could without shouting. In the narrow space between the bottom of the stairs and the lab door, it felt very much like shouting as loudly as he could. There was no other sound down here, barely even the noise you’d expect of cleaning up a glass-and-coffee spill. “It’s important.”

The door did not seem impressed with his attempts at communication.

“It’s about keeping you alive,” he tried again. (At the rate he was going, he was going start sounding like a third grader shouting at the playground bullies. _Stop ignoring me! Give me back that hat!_ ) 

The door opened again, Mr. Stark stepped through it before Steve could get a clear idea of what the interior looked like. “Refresh my memory,” he said over the sound of the doors locking, “didn’t I hire you to take care of that?” He slid past Steve with ease, ignoring any sort of personal space at all, and started up the stairs. “I do remember part of the contract stating that you would keep me alive but I could have misread that paragraph.”

“Have you reviewed this list of persons with security clearance?” Steve asked Mr. Stark’s retreating back. He closed his fist around the paper as he started up the stairs after his _boss_. “There’s at least a hundred people on the list.”

“A hundred and thirteen,” Mr. Stark said at the top of the stairs. “How’d you like the wings? Mine were a bit dry. Did you take them out of the oven when the timer went off? They shouldn’t have been that dry.”

“What?” Steve asked.

Mr. Stark spun around to look at him. He was a good three inches shorter than Steve, wearing a pair of jeans and a dark T-shirt that had once had the image of a cat on it. Standing there looking at Steve, he could have convinced any man he was just an insolent teenager and not a grown man and billionaire with a known threat against his life. “Did you take the wings out of the oven when the timer went off?”

“That’s not important. This,” he held the list up, “is important. You did not mention to Ms. Rushman that you had one hundred and thirteen possible security risks.”

Mr. Stark was smiling. He was _smiling_. “If one hundred and twelve people on that list haven’t killed me yet, they aren’t going to.” But he also sighed, before Steve could inform him that his previous statement was stupidly suicidal, and crossed his arms over his chest. “What would you like me to do?”

Take this seriously would have been a nice start. Act as if his life were in danger, act as if he understood that any one of these people could be convinced to participate in an assassination attempt. People were only as honorable as their circumstances allowed them to be. (Hadn’t Steve learned that the hard way? Hadn’t he been forced to make friends with ideas that he could barely stomach. Hadn’t he been asked to condone criminal, immoral, unjust actions—)

“Mr. Stark,” Steve said. “I cannot protect you if I am not fully informed about the risks. I will _not_ continue with this assignment if you cannot guarantee that you are providing me with the most accurate, most up-to-date information about the potential threats against your life. This,” he lifted the list again, “was not given to my employer and as such we have had no time to assess these people. If you expect me to continue as your bodyguard, you will either need to make this list and any other exceptions to the house’s security protocol available to my agency or you will revoke all security clearances except the names you have already provided.”

Mr. Stark’s smile did not slide an inch. Throughout the whole speech, he barely managed to register an emotion but boredom, looking right back at Steve without flinching, and once it was his turn to speak, he said, “with all due respect to your agency,” was Mr. Stark’s attempt not to laugh in his face, “I doubt your elite staff of—one? There is only Ms. Rushman?—could do a better job of vetting the potential security risks than JARVIS.”

The _arrogance_ of that statement was going to get this man killed.

“As you are in violation of our contractual agreement, I am—” (leaving).

“Mr. Rogers,” JARVIS interrupted. His bland tone conveyed no urgency but the lack of emotion did nothing to undercut how ominous: “Mr. Stane is approaching the front door.”

Mr. Stark’s pleased-pink face blanched white. His arms fell away from their arrogant cross over his chest, and as if he had no idea he was doing it, he stepped backward, out of the direct line of sight of the front door. “You do what you’ve got to do,” he said.

(This was the reason Natasha told him he needed to see some anger therapist, because just for a moment, he thought the only right thing to do would be to punch Mr. Stark for putting them in this position. It was just a flash, like cold butter in a hot pan, sizzling away into smoke.) Steve folded the paper up and slid it into his pocket as the front door opened. Obadiah Stane walked into the house, carrying nothing but a set of keys he folded into his fist. His smile was self-assured, his suit was slick and tailored. He moved without care, without evasion or threat, inviting himself silently into the home. “Hello,” Mr. Stane without so much as a stutter between what he’d expected to find (Mr. Stark alone) and what he found instead. His smile settled deeper into his cheeks as he came to a slow stop an inch and a half too close to Steve. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said.

“This is Steve,” Mr. Stark said. He made it sound irrelevant, as if men in suits showed up in Mr. Stark’s living room all the time. “He’s a temporary hire. Pepper said I should hire a real security guard—” 

Mr. Stane didn’t care about anything that Mr. Stark had just said. He didn’t even seem to notice that someone had spoken at all. He was absorbed in staring Steve down, standing there with his hands on his hips. He had puffed out his chest, showing off his blue shirt and his stupid white collar, drew attention to the middle-aged paunch that was filling out over his belt. In a fair fight, Stane didn’t stand a chance, but the man that was smiling into Steve’s face had never engaged in a fair fight in his life. “Haven’t I been telling you that for years?” Stane said, he slid easily sideways, stepping around Steve as if he didn’t exist. “Happy is a—”

Steve stepped with Stane, matched his motion exactly, keeping his body between Mr. Stark and the man who couldn’t be bothered to look at his fellow humans as _people_. That made his smile quirk up at the corner, it made his eyebrow flinch as the muscle just below his left eye started jumping. If a man was looking closely they could see Stane’s blood pressure start to rise.

“Are you kidding me with this?” Stane asked. He laughed, puffed up and dismissive, “where did you hire him? I’m not a threat.”

Mr. Stark said, “Steve, he’s not a threat.” The thing was, he made it sound _true_. Mr. Stark’s hand pulled at his arm just above his elbow. “Come on, let the man come in.”

Stane’s parting smile was the worst one. It didn’t falter for a second, didn’t change, it didn’t lower itself to address Steve’s impoliteness. It layered warmth over his soulless eyes as it turned to Mr. Stark, as he lifted his arm and slid it around Mr. Stark’s shoulders. He was tall enough to make it effortless, to make an affectionate gesture a trap. Stane’s voice was low, and private, stage whispering, “if you felt you needed more protection you should have come to me. What have I said since the beginning? What have I said since your parents passed? I’m here for whatever you need, Tony. If you needed someone, I have a very good relationship with a very reputable firm.” 

“I needed to do this one myself,” Mr. Stark answered. He stopped walking before Stane wanted him to. He shifted on his feet, moving his shoulder away from Stane’s body, trying to create space that didn’t exist between them. “You know Pepper,” he said, “she worries—and after Afghanistan, and my—” Mr. Stark shrugged when he said, “announcement,” creating a sense of air quotes with his helpless smile. “She felt that we needed—”

Stane’s hands were on Mr. Stark’s shoulders, his fingers were cupped just slightly around his neck, like he was holding him in place. Like it was necessary to draw any more focus onto him. Mr. Stark was smiling at the face of the man that wanted to kill him, smiling like they were still friends. Stane was too arrogant, or too used to the fear in Mr. Stark’s body language to notice anything below that smile had changed. He said, “of course,” as he nodded, “of course you feel that way. Of course.” 

Mr. Stark cleared his throat, “do you have news about the board? Have you made any progress with convincing them I’m—”

“You know the board,” Stane said. His hands didn’t _leave_ , even after Mr. Stark tried to shrug one off. It just slid lower, rested against his chest over his beating heart. “I’m trying. Come on, Tony. You know that I’m trying. It would help,” Stane said, “if you had something to give them. Think of it as an apology—we could put this whole thing behind us. Weren’t you working on that—”

“We’re done making weapons,” Stark said, “whatever I was working on before? It’s gone. I wipe the hard drive, I cleared the cloud, I erased all the files. It’s all gone, there’s nothing to give them.”

That made Stane step back. That made him recoil like a snake gathering itself up. He was bristling with disapproval, resting his wandering hands back on his body. “Tony,” was just _disappointed_ , “we’re not going to get anywhere with that kind of attitude. You can’t except the board to accept that—”

“I don’t care,” Stark said, “I own controlling interest in this company and we’re not making any more weapons.” There were no weak points in that statement. There was no room to squirm inside of the statement, to rip apart it from the inside out. Stark wasn’t smiling now, he wasn’t keeping his body still and waiting, he was arms-over-chest staring back at Stane. 

And Stane? Stane looked sideways at Steve, looked at him like an unclean thing he’d found on the bottom of his shoe. Looked at him how he couldn’t look at Stark. He shook his head and slapped a smile back on his face. “You’re just like your Father,” (was a _threat_ , as sure as it was anything), “that’s how he got his name on the side of the building, that’s how he built the empire,” Stane put his palms up in surrender, “fine, fine. I’ll do what I can with the board but this,” he motioned at Steve, “this isn’t going to reassure them that you’re _you_. That you’re thinking with a clear head.”

“My head has never been more clear,” Stark said. “I’ve never been this focused in my life, Obie. I finally see everything, and we cannot go back to the way we were doing things before.” He dismissed Steve’s whole presence with a motion of his hand, “this is for Pepper. That’s all this is, to make her feel better. He’s a six-foot appeasement. I picked him up at an Abercrombie and Fitch, look at him,” and they did both look at him. Stark’s face a picture of perfect arrogance, Stane playing the part of a man willing to be convinced, “he’s just here to look the part. It’ll just be for a few days, Obie. Just until Pepper feels better.”

(What had Happy said about Stark being very good at talking people out of things?)

Stane sighed, his hand lifted back up to rest on Stark’s shoulder. His squeezed there, his smile was forgiving, “you should never hire friends. That’s part of your problem, Tony. You always hire _friends_. What was Happy when you found him? An undergrad? A high school boxer? You’re _too_ compassionate, Tony. That’s your problem. You have to learn to keep business as business.” 

Stark shrugged.

“Alright,” Stane said. “Alright. Hey. You know I love you. You know I only want what’s best.” He finally let his hand slide off Stark’s body. He stepped back, “that’s a nice suit,” he said toward Steve (but not too him), “you always have to have the best. Might want to make sure he does a better job looking the part if you’re going to take him out in public.” Stane was finished, he was preparing his exit.

“He’s tall,” Stark said.

Stane laughed. “I need to get back to the office, get back to work. Take care of yourself, Tony.” He didn’t motion toward the door but drift back the way he came, saying, “I’ll show myself out,” as if it needed to be said.

Steve waited until Stane had a two-step head start before he followed after him. He didn’t rush, he didn’t stomp, he just moved in time with the man. He watched how little the man cared, how unworried he was to be followed. Men like him were never bothered; they lived in an imaginary place where they were safe from repercussions, where nothing bad would ever happen to them. Like a skinny six pound lap dog they had a misconception that the world was afraid of them. It wasn’t Stane’s fault he’d made it this far without being challenged; that’s just the way it happened. 

They were in the foyer, Stane turning on his heels to smile at him one more time. “Take care of our boy,” he said, “I’ll make it worth your time.” 

Steve didn’t nod, he didn’t speak, he didn’t blink. He just looked right back at Stane’s smile until the moment started to stretch thin. 

(Bucky hated that about him. He hated how Steve got it into his head that bullies weren’t men to fear, that men like this didn’t deserve to be treated like threats. Bucky treated threats with some care, he kept them complacent until he was ready to strike. He let them talk, he let them smile, let them make asses out of themselves, because Bucky believed in _strategy_. He believed in shadows, and optimal circumstances. Steve didn’t see any point in letting a man with a bloated sense of importance and a cruel grin treat him like something beneath him. He didn’t see the point in cowering, in agreeing he was inferior. No, Steve believed in fighting when fighting was appropriate.)

“Not much for words,” Stane said. “You can go, I know how to open a door.”

Steve didn’t move.

Stane didn’t move.

Stark came from behind them, “stand down,” he said to Steve. He slid around him, put his hand on Stane’s arm and turned his body, broke the staring contest that was going to end badly for one of them. (Just, that person wasn’t going to be Steve.) He was muttering his apologies, walking Stane the last few feet to the door, telling him how appreciative he was for the visit, promising him how he was always welcome.

The door opened, Stane said, “next time you need a body guard, just ask me Tony. I know a very reputable firm. Real professionals.” 

“I hope there isn’t a next time,” Stark said. “Have a good day, Obie.”

“I’ll see you soon,” Stane promised. 

Stark stayed in the doorway, watching until Stane was in the car, until the car was driving away. Until JARVIS bothered to say they had passed the gate at the end of the drive way. Stark stayed in the doorway, hand folded around the knob until his knuckles were white. He kept his back to Steve until all the dust had settled again, until there was no evidence that Stane had been there at all. When he closed the door, he rubbed his forehead with his fingers and cleared his throat to refocus on what they had been saying. His arms were back over his chest, he was as defiant as he had been, acting as if there were no threat against his life. “You were just leaving?” he asked.

No. Personal differences aside, there was no chance Steve could walk away from this with a clear conscious. No way he could leave any man to be murdered by the filthy creature prancing around in a people suit that was Obadiah Stane. 

Steve slid his hand into the pocket where he’d stuck the paper, he pulled it out, unfolded it and held it out to Stark. “Take away their security clearance. Get me the list of the venues we’re scheduled to visit.” 

Stark took the paper, he didn’t bother to look at it, “I can’t lock him out. He’ll suspect something, he’ll destroy all the evidence we have against him. He has to think he’s safe.”

There was no chance that Stane didn’t feel safe. He felt untouchable. He felt larger than life. He had made himself a god among mortal men; the only thing standing between him and total domination was the man standing in front of Steve, was Stark himself. Whatever obstacle Stark represented, it was the final one Stane had to remove.

“Then set an alert,” Steve said. 

Stark ran his tongue over his lips, folded the paper in half and tucked it into his back pocket. “JARVIS,” he said, “revoke all security clearances except Pepper, Happy, Rhodey and Obadiah Stane.”

“Yes, sir.”

Stark raised an eyebrow. Then he resumed, “you forgot about the wings, didn’t you? It’s okay if you did. I just wish you would have told me, I would have had JARVIS do it.”

Sometimes, if you weren’t a cruel person, you just had to let a man have an escape route. Steve rolled his eyes, he said, “I forgot them for five minutes.”

Stark grinned (for a second), and then he said, “I’ll be in the lab.” He was already half the distance to the staircase when he stopped to say, “consider the venue information sent. Don’t let Pepper bully you into the suit. She’s not that scary.” (So said the man that had just used her name like invoking a pagan goddess to protect him from a bad man.)


	4. Chapter 4

All choices had power; it was just some choices had enough power to alter the entire course of a person’s future. If the world were made fair, there would have been some indication of the significance of the decision before you. (Maybe it was better that there wasn’t, maybe it didn’t matter if Steve had known when he was twenty-three and full of ideals because it _had_ felt important to him then. It had felt like the exact choice he’d been waiting his whole life to make. Maybe he wasn’t a fan of all of the fallout, but—)

Steve hadn’t slept the night before the procedure that changed his life and it was a shame that he hadn’t. It was the sort of thing that a man thought about the long, dark, unmoving hours of the night. How nice it was to feel tired, to wake up refreshed, to experience these things. They were underrated sensations as far as he was concerned.

Stark could experience exhaustion. He could experience fear. That vibrating sensation of mortal dread that all living, breathing things should be capable of feeling when faced with a predator they were unequipped to defeat. Steve had traded a portion of his mortality for an upgrade to his physical body and it hadn’t seemed like very much to give at all before. (What man thought he would miss fear, and exhaustion, and—)

“JARVIS.” Steve had traded the suit for his own clothes as soon as the sun had gone down. He’d made a quick meal in the kitchen and brought a handful of snacks with him as he made camp outside the lab door. That had been hours ago now. “Is Mr. Stark asleep?”

“Yes, sir,” JARVIS said. 

The lab was the safest place in the building. That did not mean that it was _safe_ only that it was _safer_ than the alternatives. Sometimes a man had to make do with safer. Steve could respect that, even if he didn’t like it. He could understand the instinct to stay behind doors with good locks and walls made of concrete. 

“Good,” Steve said. He shifted his weight, pulled the phone out of his back pocket and pressed the power button with his thumb. Natasha called it a ‘burner phone’, the sort of thing that was hard to trace and good for basically nothing except making ill-advised phone calls. Every time she slapped it into his palm she said _try not to call Bucky_. It made the familiar way he thumbed into the digits of Bucky’s number seem childish.

The phone rang three times before Bucky answered it. “It’s one in the morning, Steve.” (Was it?) “What’s wrong? Is the billionaire being mean to you? Did he insult your favorite plaid shirt?”

“No,” Steve said. (He had not brought his favorite plaid shirt with him.) “I was given incomplete information at the start of the mission. I was led to believe that we knew the person Stark needed to be protected from but that’s not the case.”

“No?” Bucky mumbled, most likely while laying on his back, most likely while staring at the ceiling wondering what he’d ever done to get Steve as a best friend. “Natasha’s not usually wrong about these things.”

“This isn’t the sort of man that’s going to get his hands dirty if he can help it. He’s wealthy enough to hire a professional, that means it’s impossible to predict the method of assassination. They could come at him from any angle—how am I supposed to protect him from an unlimited number of threats?”

Bucky sighed, long and aggravated, as he dragged himself up to sitting on the other side of the line. He was rubbing his forehead with his fingers. “Are you asking me for a professional opinion, Steve? I thought we had agreed that we wouldn’t talk about my professional opinions.”

“I just wanted—” What? A friend? Advice? To know what Bucky would do? That was dangerous territory asking Bucky what he would do; that was the sort of thing that ended with arguments and fist fights. The very reason they had moved through six states in three months before they met Natasha. That was the line they drew in the sand, the one they didn’t cross. “To vent. He’s doing nothing to protect himself. It’s frustrating.”

“He’s probably doing more than you think he is,” Bucky said. “Stark’s smarter than any of us, who knows what the hell he’s doing to protect himself. Hell, for all we know he’s building some kind of metal suit he’s going to live in. Look—” (No matter what, no matter how they fought, no matter what divided them, it always came back to the only fact that mattered: all they had was each other. They were the only ones that had survived, the only ones that remembered—) “You’re quick, and you’re strong, Steve. They don’t know that. Work your strengths, make sure he doesn’t eat or drink anything and watch out for bullets.”

“Yeah,” Steve agreed. “Right.”

“And get some sleep, Steve.” Bucky paused a moment, just long enough to be sure nothing else was going to be said and then he hung up. The line went dead as the quiet, quiet hallway, and Steve was left with a pile of trash that used to be snacks and a closed lab door.

\--

Stark came out the next morning at ten fifteen, carrying an empty cookie sheet with a towel thrown over his shoulder. He was a walking hangover, with narrowed eyes and decreased coordination. “Did you sleep here?”

Steve had cleaned up his trash after his brief nap and traded his burner phone for the print out of Natasha’s assessment of the venue. (All that he needed to know had been summarized on the top of the page, faxed over with her tight, slanted handwriting: “the only defensible area of the building is the upstairs men’s bathroom.” Only that because it assumed the windows were too narrow and too high for anyone to _try_.)

There was security at the doors, but it was a charity event full of rich men and women. Between the staff, the press and the attendees the risks outnumbered Steve by the hundreds. The (most likely most accurate) blueprint of the building was spread out on the floor, taped together with a roll of blue tape he’d found in the kitchen drawer. Stark was looking down at the spread, at Steve sitting there, forehead wrinkled up from the headache he was likely experiencing with an exasperation that only people who had never been asked to take a moment to consider their own safety could manage. 

“Yes,” Steve said. “We need to talk about—”

“If the bedroom is too big for you, there’s always a couch,” Stark said.

There was too much condescension in that statement for Steve to worry over. “I need you to understand the risk that you’re taking by going to this Fireman’s ball.”

“The Stark Third Annual Benefit for Firefighters Family Fund?” 

“Yes.”

Stark didn’t roll his eyes, but it didn’t seem like he didn’t want to. Instead he stepped around the papers that Steve had spread out on the floor, sparing only the time to say, “there’s screens all over the house, you don’t need to kill the trees, Steve.”

Steve thought about letting Stark get poisoned by a wayward crab puff, he thought about it thoroughly in a split second, and then he got to his feet and left the papers where they were. Up the stairs, Stark was already in the kitchen (how did he move so quickly), slipping the cookie sheet into the dishwasher. “I just think it’s important that we go over some basic safety protocols for people that are under threat of assassination.”

“Stay out of Afghanistan,” Stark mumble as he pulled open the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water. He unscrewed the cap to drink a mouthful as he turned around and leaned against the counter. “Fine, let me hear them. What are these rules?”

“To start, no eating or drinking anything served at the venue.”

“That’s unrealistic,” Stark said. “Not to mention that it’s very unlikely that they’d attempt to poison me at an event as large as this one is going to be. It’s inefficient and, frankly, classless.”

The man who had already been kidnapped and held for ransom was standing in his kitchen with a hangover, waving his hand at the suggestion he might be poisoned to death because it wasn’t _classy_ enough. Steve didn’t even have a response to that. “How exactly do you expect to be assassinated?”

Stark snorted at that, “the old fashion way,” he said. His finger reached up to tap the center of his forehead. “Obie’s likes the classics, big guns and big explosions. He has the sense of refinement of a twelve year old—the only time he’ll settle for elegance is when it’s _cruel_. You should see some of the shit I had to veto ever getting built. You think the Jericho is a nightmare, you can’t imagine what Obie has his teams thinking up.” Stark took another drink of water, pushed himself away from the counter top and slapped Steve on the back of the shoulder as he passed him. “Guns and knives, Steve. That’s the sort of thing you should worry about. I’m going to take a shower.”

Right, of course, because it was important to look your best for your own funeral.

\--

More infuriating than having his concerns brushed off, than being ignored for the whole afternoon, than having to wear the suit that had been tailored by a man who described him as a ‘crunchy snack’ was that when Stark finally did emerge (from the lab, despite how he had gone upstairs to shower and had not been seen since then) he was fully dressed for the charity ball, carrying a pair of keys in one fist. 

“Wow,” he said three feet from where Steve was standing, waiting, working through how angry he was to have his professional concerns dismissed. How _unnecessarily_ antagonistic Stark was, and how unnecessary the risks he was taking were. Steve was ready for any kind of fight, but not for the way Stark looked at him like an echo of Clarence’s restless fingertips touching Steve everywhere he could. “That is a very nice suit. Pepper?”

“Yes,” Steve said. “Mr. Stark I really think that it’s important to—”

“Tell me in the car.” 

In the _car_. The one that the billionaire drove himself. He drove himself to an unsecured charity event while he knew that his life was in danger. Steve said nothing, Stark said nothing, they drove in silence.

“I’m not unreasonable,” Stark said when they were parked outside of the venue. The press were a constant assault of light flashes and camera men leaning as close as they could. Beyond the windows the noise had to be deafening. Inside the car, it was only a man who had recently thought he wasn’t going to make it out alive, looking at Steve with something like honesty. “I don’t want to die.”

“Don’t eat or drink anything,” Steve said. “ _Stay_ with me.”

The doors were pulled open by the men who parked the cars and Steve ducked his head as low as he could as the press went _insane_ to discover the car had contained Tony Stark. Stark came around the car with a smile, his voice enigmatic and attractive as he said told everyone to have a good night, dashing right past anyone with questions up the stairs and down the red carpet. 

Steve, in comparison, was as elegant as a bull in a china shop, trying to sidestep the press and their questions, shouting how he was related, if he was related, if he was a date or a—

_Say nothing_ , Ms. Potts had said to him two days ago. So, he said nothing as he hurried to catch up with Mr. Stark already kissing some pretty woman’s cheeks while he held her hands, and listened to her reassuring small talk about how glad they all were that he had survived his ordeal.

“Thank you,” Stark said up and down the carpet, “I’ll see you inside,” he repeated to everyone that stopped him to say how pleased they were to see him out and looking healthy. In the last few feet of free space, he sighed like a deflating balloon, fingers pinched on the bridge of his nose. 

“Mr. Stark,” interrupted the quiet moment. It was a woman wearing a knowing smile, dressed like understated sin, with a folder under her arm. 

Stark looked right at him, directly at him, the look of a man about to face his own execution, the one resolved to go out with defiance (if not dignity) just before a smile crossed his face and spun in a circle to look at her face-to-face, “Carrie.”

“Christine,” she said.

“That’s right.” They were having the conversation in a knot of space on the carpet, close enough to the front door to almost take advantage of the increased safety _indoors_ would provide but far enough away that anyone with a range weapons and decent aim could take a shot. “Ho—How are you?”

“You have a lot of nerve showing up here tonight,” Christine said. “Can I at least get a reaction from you?”

“Panic,” Stark said. He looked sideways at Steve moving into the most likely line of fire, that (conveniently) also blocked the majority of the camera flashes still hungrily snapping away at the chance of getting a good photo. “I would say panic is my reaction.”

Christine’s smile was unforgiving, she pulled the folder out from under her arm and held it out, “really? Because I was referring to your company’s involvement in the latest atrocity.” She had the air of a woman with a grudge (and there was no need to guess at what it was, what with Stark’s reputation and his fondness for crunchy snacks), “I _almost_ bought it, hook, line and sinker. _Almost._ ”

Stark didn’t accept the folder she was holding out, it just hovered in the space between them as he said (with a smile on his face), “I was out of town for a couple of months. In case you did—”

“Is this what you call accountability?” she shook the folder.

Stark didn’t take it from her so Steve reached out to take it. He flipped it open, trying to concentrate on the noise of the crowd (and the closeness of that door) and take in the pictures inside the folder all at once. They were grainy surveillance photos, the very sort of thing that got handed out at mission briefs, the kind of pictures that got stuck in his nightmares. It was an echo of his past and judging from how Stark’s smile slid right off his face, from how he recoiled at the sight of them, a reminder of Stark’s very real _present_. 

“When were these taken?” Stark asked.

Christine wasn’t smiling, but she was smug (and disappointed), “Yesterday.”

Yesterday, men with their faces covered, with automatic weapons and blurry expressions were standing between a pile of dead bodies and a stack of Stark’s weapons. Stark was shaking his head, whispering (mostly to himself), “I didn’t approve this shipment.”

“Someone did,” Christine said.

Steve slapped the folder shut. “Mr. Stark, we need to get inside.” He didn’t keep the folder, (because you never kept incriminating evidence when you didn’t have to) but hand it back to her. His hand slid up Stark’s back because the man wasn’t moving, was looking back down the carpet, at the noise erupting behind them, at Obadiah Stane arriving like an aging movie star. He was an elegant figure in a sea of lights. “We should go inside,” he said again.

Stark let himself be pushed toward the door, recovered just enough to look back at Christine, “I’ll get to the bottom of this. It wasn’t a line. Stark Industries is _not_ making weapons.”

“Can I quote you—”

“Yes,” Stark said before Steve pushed him over the threshold and inside. There was no sensation of relief, only a shift. The space inside was open, but less so. It was filled with more bodies, with infinite unknown players milling around in nice clothes and waiter uniforms. “God,” Stark said, “I need a drink.”

“Mr. Stark,” Steve said. (They had just agreed not to drink or eat anything—)

Ms. Potts was at the bar, looking anxiously out toward the crowd. She was unrecognizable as the unsmiling, unimpressed woman that looked at him as unnecessary. Here, she was pink with worry, all but sighing with relief as soon as she saw Stark step up to the bar. “Where have you been?”

“I was on the red carpet,” Stark said.

“I thought we agreed that was a bad idea.”

“You agreed,” Stark countered. He said, “scotch, I’m starving,” to the man behind the counter. 

“Mr. Stark,” Steve said again. It was a fruitless attempt to keep the man from picking up the tumbler of liquor. It was in his mouth before Steve could waste any breath trying to talk him out of it. (For a split second, he considered picking up a glass bottle and finishing the uncooperative bastard off himself, just to save them all the time.) 

“ _Tony_ ,” Ms. Potts said.

“I’m fine,” he countered. “I’ve got—” he motioned at Steve, frowning at him as he finished off his little glass of liquor. “him. I’m fine. Can we dance? We should keep up appearances—”

“Appearances don’t require me to dance with my boss while I’m wearing a dress with no back. Why don’t you find someone else? Dance with _Steve_.” She was shaking her head, looking away before all that nervous energy made her step away. 

Stark’s hand moved like he wanted to pull her back, but he didn’t follow through. No, instead, he stood by the bar holding his empty glass, watching her walk away. “We’re not dancing,” he said. 

“If that drink was poisoned you won’t be breathing in five minutes,” Steve said. “I prefer my dance partners to have more longevity.”

Stark snorted at that. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a device as slim as a pen and pressed it against his fingertip. It beeped as it drew blood, hummed a matter of seconds and turned green on the end. “Look at that,” he said, “not poisoned yet.” He turned around to hand the glass back to the bartender. “Let’s find someone that will dance with me.”

\--

Steve was not unnoticeable. He had been, in the past, nothing more than a figure easily overlooked (or looked over) but he did not consider himself as easily ignored as a bit of furniture in years. Yet, there he was, not much more than an arm’s length away from Stark and garnering more than one or two curious side-glances from the beautiful woman that Stark invited himself to talk to.

If there weren’t more important things to worry over, Steve might have found the act more nauseating. Stark was as vain as a bird, but as undeniably attractive as one of those tropical types that were all swagger and bright feathers. (He did wonder, while they were safely installed in a corner and Stark was regaling his captive audience with a story about his childhood interest in horse racing, how often Stark had been compared to a peacock.) 

Steve would have thought being followed by a silent, six foot (one inch) tall man would have put somewhat of a damper the romance of slow dancing, but there was no indication that Britney (Stark’s current partner) cared about him. There was only barely evidence she’d noticed him, and she might not have until he nudged Stark’s swaying body out of the trajectory that would have taken him back in front of the same window for the sixth time in a row. 

They just shouldn’t make things _too_ easy for the would be assassins. 

His hand had touched Britney’s arm, and she’d looked over at him with amusement, “is he a body guard?”

“Who?” Stark asked, went through the trouble of looking over at him, “oh, him? He’s my dance coach. What do you think? Are the lessons paying off?”

Steve could not believe she laughed at that. He could hardly contain himself when she leaned her body closer to Stark’s, when his respectful hands slid down her back. It was a shame what passed for romance these days. If all it took to woo a woman was a well-placed quip, a somewhat handsome face, and the ability to sway to music—

The very idea of a silent gun was an oxymoron; it was as impossible as the concept of _safety_ in hostile territory. (And that was where they were, in hostile unknown territory, getting wrapped up in distractions.) A man settled for _safer_ when he had no alternatives and _quieter_ when he needed it. 

Guns weren’t silent. Bullets weren’t silent. Even with the music, and the voices, and his own distaste filling up the space between his ears, Steve heard the discharge, he heard the rattle of a tray held too close to the gun and the bullet. He could hear it, sure, he could _hear_ it but he couldn’t isolate it, he couldn’t _see_ it. Instinct told him it was coming from an angle he hadn’t covered, that it was moving fast, but the man with the gun wasn’t close. There were too many waiters in the room to narrow it down and they only had split seconds. Steve slid behind Stark as he started in on a turn. The man fit against his chest better than he anticipated. Steve pushed Britney backward as he pulled Stark’s arms down and close to his chest. He knocked his knees against the backs of Stark’s thighs and he took them both _down_. They were half the size they’d been a moment before, turned away from any angle Steve hadn’t already been watching.

The moment was as long as eternity, because moments like this always were. He had awareness of every minute sensation passing between his and Stark’s body. He could hear his voice gasping in shock, feel how his muscles tensed and shivered, he could feel his heart beat-beat-beating faster and faster through his back and down where Steve’s fists were wrapped around his wrists. 

Then it was over, there was no explosion of noise, no great shrieking exit. There was just the thready sound of a bullet passing through clothes, the brief, wet noise of it entering flesh and _nothing_. It stopped there. “Are you hit?” Steve asked.

“What?” Stark demanded.

Steve pulled him up to his feet, kept one arm across his shoulders to keep his head down and dragged him sideways. Britney was left behind, frowning with her hands on her hips and no idea there had been any assassination attempt. 

There were too _many_ waiters. There were too _many_ bodies. There was too much _noise_ and too much _motion_ all around them to identify any source. Steve was scanning the crowd as they went, trying to pick out anyone that was paying too much attention, anyone gearing up for a second attempt.

“Steve,” Stark said from under his arm. He pulled himself away when they made it to the hallway, straightened up his body with righteous indignation and opened his mouth to demand what had just happened. He made it as far as saying, “ _What_ ” as the beginning of a long speech, but it sputtered into, “you’re _bleeding_.” 

Look at that, there was blood running off his fingers, landing on the floor in little spots and dots. If he concentrated, he could feel a heated, invading pain in his upper arm. “I guess you were right about the bullets, we’re not safe here,” Steve said.

Obadiah Stane interrupted the very important moment, he came through the double doors that opened into the noise of the dance floor, looking flummoxed and overwrought (as any man who had just witnessed a botched assassination attempt he’d paid for might be). He was shaking his head in disbelief, “Tony!” he shouted.

Stark was staring at Steve’s blood on the ground, hadn’t heard Stane approach, reacted with _fear_ first, jumping at the sound of his name, and then spun on his heels, putting his body directly in front of Steve’s bleeding arm. “Obie.”

“What happened?” He was _laughing_ , “I heard your _bodyguard_ dragged you out. Pepper is—I was just talking to her—Pepper’s very upset. I told her, someone probably dropped some silverware.”

Stark laughed, “I think it was a champagne cork.”

“This is why you need professionals.” 

Steve stepped overtop of the blood drops, folded his arm behind his back so when Stane’s hand landed on Stark’s shoulder, when his watery, soulless eyes looked over Stark’s head at the floor behind him, he saw nothing but Steve’s unsmiling face. “I prefer to be cautious.”

“Come on,” Stane said. “I know you’ve been through—”

“I should go,” Stark said. “I should.”

“ _Tony_ ,” Stane said, smooth and confidential. His arm slid around Stark’s back, the were as close as Britney had been, sharing body heat and whispers. “I’m working hard on your behalf but this—this kind of behavior isn’t going to play well with the board.”

Stark nodded along, he tipped his head back, looked right into the face of the man who was trying to have him killed. “I know Obie, I— I just _can’t_. Too many lights, noise— I’m going to go home, get back to work.”

Stane nodded, sighed, “let me walk you out.” His fingers clenched on Stark’s shoulder, he didn’t give any room to be pushed away or turned down. No, he walked them right back down the red carpet to the valets at the end, right through a sea of reporters with flashing lights. Steve with one hand in his pocket to hide the blood on his shirt cuff, and Stark smiling as best he could. “Alright,” Stane said when the car was brought around, “get back to work. _That’s_ what’s going to make the difference. That’s what’s going to let us put all this,” he paused, thought it through, “unpleasantness behind us.”

“Sure thing,” Stark said. He took his keys, shrugged Stane’s arm off and waved at the press before he got in the driver’s seat of the car. Steve barely had his door shut before they were driving away. 

“Fuck!” Stark said six minutes and five miles away from the venue. He looked over his shoulder, at the sluggish traffic behind them and then at Steve. “Do you need a hospital? Do I take you to a hospital? I’m not up to date on my hired bodyguard protocol.”

“I need a pair of needle nose pliers and some bandages,” Steve answered. “Not a hospital.”

“Not a hospital,” Stark repeated. He was going to ask, but Stark was a very, very smart man. He’d been smart enough to leave the city to find a firm that didn’t advertise on the internet. He was smart enough to know there were reasons Steve didn’t want to go to a hospital, and smart enough to know that the less he knew about those reasons the more deniability he could maintain. “Have you been shot before?”

Yes. Steve didn’t answer, Stark didn’t repeat his question.

\--

JARVIS greeted them at the door, informed them that Ms. Potts had called twice, and mentioned how there were three new articles in the tabloids suggesting that Tony Stark was either insane, going insane or dating a jealous man. 

“Dating?” Steve repeated. 

Stark snorted. “Come on, the pliers are in the lab.” He shrugged out of his own suit jacket and threw it over the first piece of furniture they passed. “JARVIS tell Pepper we made it home, tell her I’ll call her as soon as I can.” 

Steve followed Stark down the stairs, passed the papers he’d left on the floor and through the lab door. Inside wasn’t the chaotic mess that he’d envisioned. It was a couch, and a TV, and an espresso machine. There were counters and cabinets and a robot that ducked low enough to look right at him, opening and closing its claw like a greeting. Stark pulled open a drawer in time with picking up a half-empty bottle of liquor and pulled out a pair of needle nose pliers. He took a long drink of the liquor and dropped the bottle, pliers and cap on a tall counter. “Wake up,” he said to the lab. 

It came to life with a steadily rising blue light. Screens, and holographs, and consoles came to life, lights flicked on in the distance, highlighting an entire garage full of half-finished projects and cars and— 

“Sit down,” Stark said. He pulled open another drawer and plucked out bandages and supplies, dropped them one after the other on top of the counter. He didn’t indicate that Steve should sit on the low counter behind him, but that was where Steve sat. He shrugged off his suit jacket, flinched when it irritated the wound in his arm. There was blood soaked all the way down his arm, sticking the shirt to his arm. “Take the shirt off,” Stark said. He transferred his supplies on a rolling cart while Steve unbuttoned his shirt. “JARVIS, scan Steve’s left arm, give me a good view. Let’s see what we’re working with.”

A blue light flickered across his arm one way and the other. It stuttered over the wound, and then a holograph brightened up over the table to the side. It was his arm, with the interior structures shown in shades of pink and red. The bullet was a solid, dark spot with no fragments. 

“Any damage we should be concerned about?”

“There appears to be a projectile—”

Stark sighed, “I know that JARVIS. Is he going to bleed to death if I take it out?”

JARVIS was quiet, and when he came back he said, “the odds of catastrophic blood loss are minor, sir.” (With the tone of a friend who was tired of answering the phone for these sorts of questions.)

“Have you done this before?” Steve asked.

Stark looked up at him, wiping off the length of the pliers with alcohol wipes as he shook his head no. “I get the feeling that you have,” he said. He took a moment to quietly stare at Steve’s bare chest, at his arm, and then he drew in a breath and took a drink, and asked, “should I pour this on the wound? Does that actually work?”

Maybe. “Just take the bullet out,” Steve said. If he expected Stark to be squeamish (and he did), or to be disgusted (and he expected that too) or to be hesitant (also an expectation) he was disappointed by how the man was simply methodical. He moved the holograph of Steve’s arm so he could see it clearly, and he simply pulled the bullet out. 

“That was gross,” he said when he dropped the bullet in a pan. He took a minute to grimace at the blood on the pliers before he set them down too. “Now what?”

“We need to wrap it,” Steve said.

Stark nodded, picked up the rolled gauze and then dropped it again, pushed his palms against the counter Steve was sitting on and just stared at him. “What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking I was hired to keep you alive and there was a bullet.” Steve could have given him a break, could have told him that it didn’t matter as much as Stark must have thought it did. The wound was irritated now, pulsing and hurting, but it wouldn’t be for very long. It wouldn’t last very long at all. That was the benefit of trading some of your mortality away. “Help me wrap it up,” Steve said instead. “You need to call Ms. Potts and tell her that you’re fine.”

“You have a truly generous definition of fine,” Stark said.

“Alive, then,” Steve corrected.

Stark sighed again and picked up the gauze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you liked the chapter and want the chapter link on tumblr it is [here](http://bewareofchris.tumblr.com/post/175206750537/the-hitman-the-bodyguard-and-the-billionaire-415). If you like the story and you want to listen to me, the writer, whine about having to write it and/or shout at and threaten the characters that can be found under the [Harlequin Paper Back Series](http://bewareofchris.tumblr.com/tagged/the-hitman-the-bodyguard-and-the-billionaire%3A-a-harlequin-classic) tag.


	5. Chapter 5

Stark suffered from what Steve preferred to think of selfish concern. That was, the sense of concern that came from the feeling that someone might accuse a person of having done wrong. (No, you see, I did not do wrong because even if he was shot, I pulled the bullet out.) It wasn’t limited to criminal activities, but a guilty conscience was one of the most obvious symptoms. The other was the inability to accept simple facts at face value. (Steve was fine. The wound was fine. There was no other care needed.) “So that’s it?” Stark repeated.

“Do you need there to be more?” Steve was shirtless, still sitting on a stool in the lab, trying not to notice anything specific. They were both benefitting from anonymous self-preservation. Stark didn’t ask anything about his avoidance of hospitals, Steve didn’t notice anything Stark might have been building in his highly secured personal lab. “Not everything is like the movies.”

Stark frowned at him. He took another drink out of the bottle and scoffed at the taste. “Forgive me for expressing concern. I didn’t realize I was dealing with the toughest man on the planet.” He muttered half the words to himself as he went back around to the area with the couch to pluck a glass off the stand where he’d found the bottle. “We mere mortals that feel pain and don’t enjoy it just thought you might benefit from pain medication.”

“I feel pain,” Steve said. (And he very rarely liked it.) He got up off the stool, picked up the bloody shirt and the jacket with his good hand. “If you’ve got acetaminophen—” 

Stark snorted, bubbled that up into a nervous laugh as he tipped the cup up to his mouth, swallowed another drink. He was shaking his head, mumbling under his breath about the ridiculousness of simple painkillers for gunshot wounds. “Sure,” he said loud enough to be heard, “come on, I’ll show you the medicine cabinet.”

The medicine cabinet, situated safely in Stark’s master suite, was less of a cabinet and more of a small pharmacy. There was nothing that wasn’t available over the counter, but there was one of everything any human being might need. The sheer number of bottles was dizzying, made it almost impossible to find anything, but Stark plucked the bottle of white pills out of the lineup without a moment’s pause. “Should I offer you two? I don’t want to offend your masculinity.”

“Two’s fine,” Steve said. “Can I take a drink of your scotch,” (he was only guessing), “or would that offend your alcoholism?”

Stark did laugh then, as bright as firecrackers. He slid the bottle back into the cabinet before he turned so his hips were leaning against the bathroom counter. His hand was palm-up and offering the pills. He was smiling, with his cheeks a pleased pink, as he lifted the liquor bottle he’d brought along. “By all means,” he said. 

Steve had an unfortunate habit of challenging anyone willing to make eye contact (so said Bucky with constant exasperation). That must have been why he stared right at Stark’s face as he pushed the pills into his mouth, as he lifted the bottle up and took a swig that burned his throat. He stared at him without blinking, without looking away, until the humor faded and Stark’s attention dropped from his eyes to his mouth. “Thanks,” he said.

“Right,” Stark said. He pushed himself away from the sinks and motioned them out of the room. “I guess this is where we say good night.”

Steve nodded.

Stark hesitated. “You are okay, really? You’re not just acting tough?”

“I am,” Steve assured him. “Are you going to be in the lab?”

“Yes. Good night.” Stark took his liquor bottle and his nice suit and retreated down the staircases back to his lab without so much as a backward glance. 

\--

Steve helped himself to a zipper bag of ice when he woke up from a brief nap to an inflamed, red pain in his arm. It was temporary, caused less by the trauma of the wound and more by the tissues working overtime to heal themselves. 

“Should have packed it,” he said to himself. There was nothing but appliances to hear him. (And JARVIS.) Steve might have suggested it the night before, when Stark was looking for something else that could be done, but the benefits were minimal with a wound as small as this one. The complications were more bothersome than a sore arm. One could not pack a wound once and leave it be, and Stark was smart enough to know that. He was smart enough to look up the protocol and to discover how often it should be changed. He was smart enough to know how fast wounds should heal and that was the one complication that Steve couldn’t risk. 

Ice took care of the inflammation for now. He wrapped it into place with an elastic bandage and went back downstairs to take up his post outside the lab. 

Steve had expected a few crumbs from the snacks he’d had the last time he was there, he hadn’t expected a cot, and pillows, and basket of new snacks sitting on the top. There was a note folded and tucked between a box of crackers and a container of dried fruit. It said:

_Try to get some sleep._

(It was just a guilty conscience. That was all it was. Nothing worth smiling over.)

\--

Clint answered the phone on the third ring, breathed an uncomfortable, “Good afternoon and thank you for ca—” but he was interrupted by the sound of a brief scuffle, the resounding smack of human body against solid wood and Natasha’s voice just slightly too far from the receiver saying, “this is the mission report line, Clint.” 

Steve did his best not to speculate about office romances. It was in his own best interest to practice complete and total ignorance and develop zero curiosity about why Clint spent so much of his time hanging around the office. (He certainly had no opinions about all the bandages and bruises that Clint managed to accrue in a week.) 

Natasha said, “Name?”

“Steve,” he said.

“Oh,” was more cheerful than Natasha could even pretend to be during daylight hours. “Captain america, you were covering the charity event. I didn’t see any news reports, so I assume everything went smoothly. Did Stark behave himself? Did he grope you in your personal places because we did talk about how advantageous a positive relationshi—”

“I was shot,” Steve said. He hated to interrupt a good monologue, but the longer Natasha went on the more likely it seemed that she was simply going to hang up the phone. (Then he would have had to call her back, then he would have had to explain everything anyway.)

“What?” 

“I was shot in the left arm by who I assume was an assassin posing as a waiter.” 

“I didn’t hear anything on the news about a police response,” she said. “I didn’t hear anything about an alleged assassin being sent to the hospital—there weren’t even reports of a body being kicked out a window.”

(Apparently, if you kicked one man out of a third story window, you could never be allowed to forget it. The man had even _survived_. But it had to be brought up every single time.) Steve cleared his throat to explain how it had happened. Stark was dancing, there were waiters everywhere, there— “Was no responsible way to secure Stark _and_ investigate the possible source of the attempt.”

“So, you have no idea who is responsible for the attack?”

“No, we know who is responsible for the attack. I didn’t see the assassin, and he didn’t take a second shot which seemed to say that he wasn’t interested in collateral damage.”

Natasha cleared her throat, and she sighed, and she said, “maybe he wasn’t interested in collateral damage this time, but the stakes are going to be higher the next time, Steve. Men like Obadiah Stane that are willing to pay terrorists to kill their friends, they don’t like being disappointed. Whoever is pulling the trigger is going to try again, and they’re going to be a lot more interested in getting the job done.” But also, “was Stark injured?”

“No.”

“How bad is your wound?”

It wasn’t worth getting upset over. Steve shrugged, with his shoulders against the wall and his legs folded in front of him. The cot was more plush than the couch he slept on normally, the exact sort of thing that invited a man to stretch out, to close his eyes, to consider napping a little. “I’ll live.”

“I’ve seen what you can live through. That’s not as comforting as you might think.” But she sighed again, “I’ll do some digging, I’ll try to see if we’re familiar with the hired gun.” The phone call was over after that, a simple matter of dropping the handset into the receiver and then Steve was alone, on this cot, thinking nice thoughts about how maybe another nap wouldn’t be entirely unwarranted.

\--

It was still dark when Steve woke up. He walked the perimeter. He went to his favorite screen in the kitchen to check all the entries were alarmed. He paced back and forth at the top of the stairs down to the lab, thinking about how comfortable the cot was, and how Stark was probably sleeping in the lab again. 

(Thinking, that even if Stark wasn’t sleeping, he knew his way around this house better than anyone and he could pop up anywhere he wanted even if it didn’t seem possible.) 

The danger that had felt immediate before was fading. It was a mistake to get comfortable when the threat remained, but it was hard to stay at high alert in a quiet house, surrounded by security so unique that it was theoretically impenetrable. A man could mistake the quiet for peace, he could be convinced to let his guard down.

Steve had gotten caught up in the mundaneness of watching rich people in nice clothes spin each other in circles, he’d almost missed that bullet. So, he filled the zipper bag with fresh ice and went back downstairs to the cot Stark had left him. 

“JARVIS, is he sleeping?”

“Yes, sir.”

Good.

\--

The lab door opened just after seven AM. Stark was on the other side, squinting at the light in the hallway, carrying his suit jacket and his shirt in over one arm. His tie was looped around his neck and he was wearing an undershirt that was wrinkled up from sleeping in the same position for too long. His hair, usually coiffed back away from his face, was mussed up into fluffy curls, falling forward into his face. 

“Pepper did give you a room, right?” Stark asked.

“Yes, sir.”

Stark frowned at him or the light, or both. He shook his head, and pulled the door shut behind him, leaving them in a narrow space with no distracting sounds. “Is it comfortable?”

“Very.”

“How’s your arm?”

It was lingering on red pain, all hot around the edges, but it was more healed than it should have been after twelve hours. Even men with no experience with wounds could see that, so Steve rested his hand across the bandage and said, “I’ll live.”

Stark didn’t roll his eyes this time, he just nodded along. “Coffee?” It may have been a question about the existence of coffee, it might have been an offer to get a cup, or it might have just been an attempt to figure out what should follow. Stark was none of the things that Steve had expected him to be, not the night before, not the day before that and not now. Right now, with just his socks, and his bedhead and his undershirt, looking tired and vulnerable. 

( _You’re so predictable it’s boring_ , Bucky had told him once. At a pub in a country Steve wouldn’t name even in his own head. With the aftermath of their mission still lingering on their skin. Bucky was working on getting drunk, sipping every liquor he could find, passing out what passed for wisdom in bars. _You’re always hoping to find the perfect girl, the perfect guy, the ideal. There is no ideal, Steven. And if there were, you wouldn’t want them. You want someone that looks like a newborn kitten and never stops giving you hell._ )

“Can you find the pot?”

Stark gave him the finger. “You make the coffee, I’ll take a shower, we can meet in the middle. Or the kitchen. The kitchen isn’t the middle, but we should meet there, where the coffee is kept.” He was still adding phrases onto the original sentence as he climbed the stairs, muttering nonsense to himself about architecture and design flow and optimizing (something, or another). 

\--

Steve was in the kitchen, making eggs and bacon, staring at the full pot of coffee and briefly wondering if maybe Stark had fallen asleep in the shower. JARVIS might have been able to confirm his suspicion, but it didn’t seem appropriate to ask the AI what their boss was doing in the shower. 

Out in the other room, JARVIS announced, “Ms. Potts is here, sir.” The words weren’t meant for him (and why would they be, not like Steve had been hired to keep Stark safe. Not like he would need to know who was coming and going in the house). 

“Tony!” was loud enough to be heard from the kitchen. Ms. Potts’ voice carried well around corners, even better when it was pitched high from stress like that. 

Stark’s answer was quiet, “Pepper,” was placid, calming, almost too quiet to be heard from the doorway of the kitchen. “Is shouting really necessary?”

“ _Is_ it?” Ms. Potts repeated. “I feel that it’s appropriate. I feel that it is more than appropriate when you showed up to a benefit that we,” no telling who ‘we’ included, if it were more than once person or just Pepper herself, “had felt was too dangerous to risk. You ignore your bodyguard’s advice, you dance with _Britney_ ,” (whoever Britney was she had been the most offensive part of the sentence), “and then you disappear. You disappear and I spend the rest of the evening fielding very sincere well wishes, and inquiries about whether or not it might be better to have you _confined_ for the duration of your illness for the _company_ ’s sake.”

“Well, I told you not to talk to Obie.” Stark must have felt that ended the conversation because his footsteps started again, getting louder and closer.

“It’s my _job_ to talk to Stane, Tony! It’s my job to be you when you aren’t there to be you, which is almost all of the time.” 

“Pepper,” Stark repeated. It was the same docile, even, quiet tone he’d used before. (That was a tactic, a bit of conflict resolution that someone must have taught him. Keep your voice calm, and even and low.) “Something came up.”

“Something?” Ms. Potts didn’t believe it for a second. “Are you sleeping with him?”

Stark was quiet, facing away from the doorway when Steve peeked to see what expression he must be making. “No,” he said. “Not that kind of something—”

“I cannot believe how irresponsible you are being, with your life, with your career, with your friend—”

“Could we not do this right now? Someone tried to shoot me last night,” Stark said. It was the first break in the modulated tone of his voice, an sudden blot of noise erupting in the middle of Ms. Potts’ steady stream of sound. It brought everything to a standstill. “Steve was shot,” was quieter than the words before. 

“Shot?” 

“In the arm.”

“Did you take him to hospital?” Either Ms. Potts had an exceptional ability to accept unreasonable things at face value or an employee getting shot did not register very high on the list of upsetting things Mr. Stark had ever done. “Why didn’t you call the cops?”

“I never saw the guy with the gun. I didn’t hear the guy with the gun, I didn’t even know someone had been shot until I saw the blood.” 

“You took him to a hospital,” this was a sticking point.

“I didn’t want to alert the authorities, Pepper. I’m not inconspicuous, and if you show up at an ER with a gunshot wound questions will be a—”

“Please,” was the sound of Ms. Potts pinching her nose, “please tell me that you brought a doctor here.

“His wound was taken care of— I really think you’re making too much out of this, it wasn’t even—”

“A _doctor_ ,” Ms. Potts repeated, “a medical professional that is authorized to work in the state of California that has been trained to make medical decisions. Please, Tony. Please tell me that you made sure this man, your employee, has been given the finest medical care you could make available, please tell me that he was seen by a doctor.”

“He was—”

“A _doctor_.”

“Yes,” Stark said. “He was seen by a doctor. He’s fine, he’s in the kitchen making me coffee if you want to interrogate him yourself.”

“I want this to be over,” Ms. Potts said. “I want you to stop putting yourself at risk. I want you to tell the police everything we know, I want Obadiah behind bars. I want things to go back to normal.”

Stark sighed, “we don’t have anything, Pepper. We have guesses, we have _conclusions_ but it’s all circumstantial. We can’t risk it because if we move too soon—”

“I know,” Ms. Potts said. “I know. I _know_.” Her voice was the sound of someone drying the tears away from their eyes, the wavy sort of voice of someone trying not to cry. “I have to get to the office,” was pert, almost perky. But her footsteps didn’t retreat, she lingered, she said, “please take this seriously, Tony. I couldn’t take losing you again.”

“I am taking it seriously,” Stark assured her. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll walk you out.”

\--

It was fifteen minutes before Stark came back, looking only slightly better than he had when he came out of the lab that morning. He filled a mug with coffee and a bit of sugar and took note of Steve eating breakfast at the counter. “There’s a table.”

“I like to stand.”

Stark didn’t argue that point. He took a drink out of his mug, hissed at the heat, and then attempted to look casual, leaning against the counter. “Any chance you weren’t listening to that?”

“I didn’t hear anything about how you lied to her about doctors,” Steve promised. (It was a cheap shot, throwing that bit about lying in. It was a damn cheap shot.) 

“It wasn’t a lie,” Stark said. “I have a few PHd’s. I’m technically a doctor. And what did you want me to tell her? No, I didn’t take him to the hospital because he didn’t want to go. _That_ would make her feel better. Don’t worry Pepper, the bodyguard has definitely been shot before. He didn’t want to go to the hospital, so we just took care of it here. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Emergency rooms ask questions.”

“Innocent men don’t usually mind questions,” Stark said. 

That depended entirely on the definition of the word _innocent_ and exactly what the person that was asking questions was hoping to find. Steve considered himself an honest man, but he was willing to concede he was only as honest as any situation allowed him to be. Sometimes self-preservation had to be worth more than the full truth. 

Stark smiled at him, and it wasn’t offensive. It was familiar, as if he’d found another commonality between them. “I hope this was a one off,” he pointed at Steve’s arm, “but if you were to get wounded again, at what point should I take you to an emergency facility?”

There wasn’t one. Steve was willing to have his corpse thrown in the ocean just so long as nobody that might have wanted to study it could ever find it. “Wrap me in a sheet, drop me at the office where you hired me. If I’m too wounded for them to fix, I wasn’t going to survive anyway.”

“And I can just hire another bodyguard while I’m there,” Stark said.

“Our firm strives to maintain quality and convenience.” 

That made Stark laugh, just a hiccup of a sound. He pulled away from the counter, “I need to get back to work. Is your arm okay? Does it need to be rewrapped? Do you need more acetaminophen?”

“It’s fine for now.” It was more fine that it should have been, and therefore safer away from Stark. 

\--

Most of Steve’s past bodyguard gigs had involved both a good deal more guarding and a greater period of time spent in the same room as the body he was supposed to protect. Most jobs weren’t scheduled for as long, or felt as semi-indefinite as this one had slowly started to be. He had acclimated himself to small talk, and afternoon reruns on the TV. He didn’t exactly know how to deal with the quiet and comfort of Stark’s mansion.

He didn’t know what he was meant to do with his time if it weren’t sitting outside the lab _waiting_ to be useful. All that empty space gave him too much time to lose focus, to drift backward into his own skull. 

Steve liked to think he was above unseemly things. Most men would like to think that if it came down to it, they would _always_ chose to do what was right. Most men had never been face to face with what Natasha liked to refer to as _extraordinary_ circumstances. Maybe some of them dreamed of the adrenaline rush of a real-life horror show, kicking open doors to the sound of men screaming in other rooms. They played video games and they watched movies, thinking about what they would do, offering critiques and commentary on the decisions of fictional men.

Truth was, Steve had really thought he would do the right thing, damn the cost, until he was face-to-face with a choice that had no right answer. He had found out something in that room with the bloody floor that he wished he could have lived the whole of his life without ever knowing. 

But he knew it, Natasha knew it, _Bucky_ knew it, that Steven Rogers was _selfish_ first and righteous next. Natasha had told him to use Stark, to put the man in his debt, and to use that debt to better his circumstances. Steve was willing to say that he wouldn’t use a man like that, and he definitely wouldn’t use a man like _Stark_ that way. Steve’s hands were soaked in blood to his elbows, he was running from men that wanted to drain his blood to make a better-stronger-more obedient version of him.

Stark wasn’t the warmonger the press liked to call him; he was just a man who had been come face to face with extraordinary circumstances. He’d made the right choice in the aftermath and that was going to get him killed. Stark had a heart, and a conscience, and a nice smile.

(And Steve had an unreliable set of morals, and _Bucky_ that deserved better than the life he was stuck with.)

\--

Steve had gone for a jog around the perimeter. He came back to find Stark in the kitchen, staring at a pot of water that had yet to start boiling. The man looked sideways at him, eyes brightening up as soon as they registered Steve.

“I hear if you watch pots, they don’t boil.” The run had felt good, had worked out all the tight places in his shoulders and his head. It had shed the ugly thoughts about mixed intentions. (Was this fondness he was feeling, or was it the impersonation of it? Was it the final realization of all those times Natasha had tried to teach him to read and manipulate a good target?) Working up a sweat always left him feeling cleaner, less burdened.

“I didn’t hear what you said,” Stark said. Judging from how he hadn’t looked up from the sweat soaked shirt sticking to Steve’s chest he wasn’t going to hear anything Steve said next. When his gaze did shift, it simply moved to his arms, and then back. “Where have you been shot? I saw you without a shirt last night, you don’t have any scars.”

Steve did not scar. “You were looking that closely?”

Stark did look at his face then, to convey his frown clearly, and then looked back at the pot of water that had started boiling. “That always happens,” he mumbled to himself. “If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine.”

“I don’t want to tell you.” (But he had been shot in his thigh, once in his calf, and at least twice in his upper body. None of them had scarred, none of them had been life threatening.) He grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, drank half of it in one go. “I thought you didn’t like pasta.”

Stark was halfway through putting fettucine into the boiling water, “I didn’t say that I didn’t like it. I don’t eat a mixing bowl full of it plain, but when it is properly mixed with sauce, meat and vegetables it’s very good.” He looked up when he was finished, as if he were about to say something but whatever that was got stolen right out of his mouth as soon as he laid eyes on Steve again. “You should take a shower,” he said. “Get a clean shirt. We can eat on the deck.”

“Which deck?”

“Does that matter?”

“Yes,” Steve said. “That deck,” he pointed toward it, “has an increased chance of you being killed by a sniper. And that deck,” he shifted his pointing finger slightly, “makes a sniper rifle completely useless. It is also unlikely someone would be able to successfully climb onto it from a hidden point.”

Stark sighed. “Having you here has really been eye-opening for me. I never knew how unsafe I should have felt in my own house until I hired you. Thank you for that, Steve.” Then he waved his hand at him, “go, shower, change your shirt. We’ll eat on the deck I’m unlikely to be assassinated on.”

It took Steve ten minutes to wash up, find a clean (if faded, and worn) shirt to put on and go down to meet Stark on the deck. He had expected nice plate settings and music, maybe a nice alcoholic beverage to really help set the mood, and was greeted by two cups of water, a sturdy white plate and Stark’s complete indifference to his arrival. 

They ate in uncompanionable silence, chewing and swallowing without attempting to talk. Stark didn’t even seem to want to look at him, but instead looked out toward the sun glinting off the water beneath them. The light highlighted the brown of his eyes and exaggerated the length of his lashes (not that Steve was looking for those details, just that they were hard to ignore). 

“So,” he said when his plate was nearly empty, and he couldn’t be sure if he was welcome to a second helping or not. “What are you working on in the lab?”

“Stuff,” Stark said. But, at least, he did refocus his long stare on Steve. At least he did seem to come back a little bit from wherever his mind had wandered. He settled back into place in his own body, taking note of his plate full of barely eaten food, and the glass of water he hadn’t even taken a sip from yet. “I don’t think you would find it very interesting anyway.”

(That probably wasn’t meant to sound offensive.) “What are you going to do once Stane is out of the way? When weapons manufacturing is finally shut down? Medical equipment?”

“Medical equipment?” Stark repeated. “No, not likely.”

“That scan you did last night—”

Stark snorted. “I don’t know anything about medicine. That holograph technology looks impressive but it’s not advanced enough to be used in medical settings, it isn’t better than the technology that is already available.” But he shrugged, leaned back in his chair, “I have a few ideas, a couple of things I’ve always wanted to work on. My _passion_ projects, my father called them. That was what he called things he didn’t think would make money.” His smile was all anger, curling up at the edges. “Isn’t it funny how you don’t question the things you’re raised with? I was raised to take over for my father; there was never any question what I would do. He was smart too,” Stark said. “Not like me,” lacked any attempt at humility, “but smart enough. He told me I had to keep up the family image, the family name, that it was a strong name and a strong company, and I had to make sure it didn’t lose its way. I never thought, _what I’m doing is killing people_. You don’t think that—not like that. I might never have thought it. My whole life, this has just been what you did when you were a Stark.” Then he just shook his head, “I can’t let it go on. I’ll take the whole company down if I have to, I’m not going to die and leave this as the legacy of my name.”

(That’s what men never expected, when they rounded that corner to walk face first into extraordinary circumstances, they never _expected_ to have to find a new way to live with themselves. But it happened anyway, you spent every moment after, just dragging yourself along.)

“I got shot in the leg once,” Steve said.

Stark made a sound like a snap, “I was so hoping it would be the ass.” Then he smiled, and Steve laughed, and Stark leaned forward to finally pick up his fork. “Have some more. I make too much. My Mother always made too much food too. It’s hereditary. Eat.”


	6. Chapter 6

Stark was sleeping in his lab (still). The morning was easing its way toward noon, exchanging the quiet of an empty house and no obligations to the rising noise of the TV playing non-stop news. Ms. Potts had arrived an hour ago, when Steve was coming back down after a shower (and a shower after he’d decided why not use the gym since nobody else was) to set up a small office on the couch. 

Steve hadn’t wanted to come to a stand still in front of the TV. He’d been stuck with the pretense of doing a job that he wasn’t really needed to do. (At very least, he wasn’t needed to do it this thoroughly. He could have stayed anywhere and showed up when Stark was going to leave the house, and nothing would have happened any differently.) The news had dragged him to a standstill on another walk around the perimeter of the building; it had caught him by the ears when he just meant to be passing through. 

“…the protest had not originally garnered much support online.” The newsman said. “It was only after photos surfaced of what appear to be Stark weapons in the possession of known terrorists that it started to gain steam.”

And it said, “the authorities are creating a perimeter around the protest for the safety of both the employees and the protesters—”

And it was footage of men and women, and kids, and fluffy dogs, holding signs declaring Tony Stark a liar and a terrorist.

“I just think,” a man with a blue shirt, and a water bottle clenched in one fist, said directly to the camera, “that it can’t be a coincidence? He was _kidnapped_ in Afghanistan and now the same terrorists that tried to kill him have weapons with his name on them? That can’t be a coincidence. I think he should go to jail.”

And it was,

“They should use his weapons on him.”

And it was,

“I think Tony Stark owes the American people an answer. I think he owes us an explanation.”

And it was, Obadiah Stane saying, “no comment,” to the cameras as he made an unnecessary appearance just to get his face on the camera. He cleaned up nice in news coverage, looked almost nothing at all like a late-stage pedophile masquerading as a human being. 

“Tony didn’t sell those weapons,” Ms. Potts whispered when the news faded to a commercial.

“I was there when he saw the photographs,” Steve said, “some reporter had them, she showed him—you can’t fake that kind of horror. I didn’t think it was him.” Oh but Obadiah was nothing but a faker, a monster wrapping itself up in people skin, slinking across the screen of the local news program, trying to shame faced and managing only to look inconvenienced. “Hasn’t there been other protests?”

“Not like this one.” She had one hand resting in her lap and the other pressed to her chest while she watched the news come back from break. Scrolling right across the bottom was breaking news, saying things like:

“Formal investigations are expected to—”

Ms. Potts let out a noise like a gasp. She shook her head like she could clear away the disaster unfolding before them. “He doesn’t deserve this.”

Steve was standing, separated from her by virtue of physical space and a smaller degree of emotional investment. He hadn’t known Stark long enough to know what he did or didn’t deserve. Steve could stand and watch it (as hard as it was) with his arms over his chest and he could accept it as it was. “It’ll work out,” he said. “He’s innocent, if they do an investigation that’s all they can prove.”

“If Obadiah is willing to kill him, I don’t see any reason why he’d think twice about framing Tony. I imagine it is even easier to kill a man in jail that it would be to kill him at a charity event—” that made her refocus on right now, on Steve, as she muted the TV as it started repeating itself. “How is your injury?”

More healed than he was willing to admit. Steve rubbed his upper arm and the bandage he’d taken the time to wrap around it. “It’s improving. Thank you for asking, Ms. Potts.”

The name made her wrinkle her nose up. “Call me Pepper. Everyone does.” Turning off the sound hadn’t stopped either of them from watching the live footage playing in the corner of the screen. It hadn’t stopped them from reading the scrolling reports, offering crowd counts and breaking news bulletins. “They’re going to drag Rhodey into this,” she whispered mostly to herself. “They’re going to make it such a mess.”

“Who’s Rhodey?”

“The military liaison to Stark Industries,” but no that wasn’t it, “Tony’s best friend.”

Lt. Colonel James Rhodes, if Steve remembered right, the man that every news channel in the country had plastered all over their screens when the news broke that Tony Stark had been found. The man who had declined comment, had declined congratulations, and when the media turned ugly, had offered no defenses. The one in the videos holding Stark’s arm while he walked down the ramp out of the plane. “Maybe they won’t.”

Pepper barked a bitter laugh. “If that was an attempt toward optimism it wasn’t a good one.” Then she sighed to herself, “I have work to do.”

So, did Steve. He had all the work in the world, down the stairs, sitting on the cot, watching the door to the lab stay shut.

\--

When Steve was in high school, tiny and sick and _invisible_ , it had felt as if things would never change. It had felt as if he would live and die exactly the same way, turning around to face the jerk in the letterman’s jacket that took pride in picking on kids that couldn’t fight back. Steve was a prime target, prey that was almost too easy. The kid with the body of a skinny skeleton, and asthma, the one that couldn’t manage to speak a single sentence to a girl without embarrassing himself. The very same boy that couldn’t run a mile without needing an inhaler, or play basketball in gym. 

Steve could have _tried_ to play basketball but the coaches _worried_. Steve looked fragile. (Steve was fragile in high school, made of all pointed angles and breakable parts.) 

Letterman jacket jocks loved picking fights with Steve, loved calling him names that bore no repeating, and when Steve couldn’t keep his mouth shut (every time, that was) things always came to blows. Steve had been a childhood expert at getting blood out of school clothes. He’d mastered field dressings long before the military had gotten their hands on him. 

That’s how he expected his life to go. He would keep on trying, keep on fighting back, keep on getting thrown to the ground and kicked in the gut. 

Every single one of them said exactly the same thing, when they had him exactly where they wanted him, they said, _Where’s your buddy? Where’s your Bucky now?_

Worse than the beating, worse than the bloody nose, worse than split lips and bruised ribs, was knowing that _everyone_ (Steve included) knew that he couldn’t defend himself. That was the feeling that filled his body with cold dread, the one that always brought him back to his feet. He could tolerate anything but having to accept the inevitable.

That was the look on Stark’s face when the lab door opened, the knife edge between acceptance and fight, and it soaked into his voice. It filled up all the space in the doorway, until they were both watching the other, waiting for someone to flinch first. Stark said, “come on, come inside.” And when Steve stepped through the doorway he said, “did Pepper leave yet?”

“I don’t think so,” Steve said.

The TV was muted, but the news coverage hadn’t changed. There was an assortment of tools on the table in front of the couch, a dry glass and a bottle of liquor. Stark was standing when he could have been sitting. “I would rather he just killed me,” Stark whispered. “I could live with that—” and a quirk of a smile caught like a fishhook at the edge of his lips, pulled them into a humorless smile. “I prefer the thought,” corrected his statement, “that he only wanted me gone. I can understand greed and I thought that was what this was. I thought he just wanted the company to himself.”

“If he wants the company, why would _he_ do this?”

Stark didn’t look away from the screen, “it’s not the money he wants. It’s the fame, it’s the power. He’s an iron monger, he’s a warlord in a nice suit. I can’t believe I never saw it. I can’t believe my father never saw it.”

(Steve thought, quietly, that warlords often wore nice suits. That was more information than he wanted to give out and more than was relevant to what Stark was saying.) “You grew up with him.”

“He was like a father,” Stark said, (but not, _to me_ ). People didn’t change overnight, they changed by degrees, so, so slowly that sometimes the longer you knew them, the harder it was to see. _I know him_ , you said to the man on the opposite side of the argument as you, _I grew up with him_. There was no past tense to it, there was only the unrelenting _belief_ that things couldn’t have changed.

You would have seen it. You would have noticed it happening; you could have seen it in their eyes, in the slight dampening of their smile. You would have felt it in the common quiet between you, when your best friend or your almost father _changed_. But the world wasn’t that kind, people didn’t change that quickly. The longer you stuck by their side, the harder it was to let go of what had been to accept was was _now_. 

“I’m sorry,” Steve said because there wasn’t anything else to say.

Stark snorted at that. It was an exhausted exhale of breath, a brief hitch to his shoulders, a smile that didn’t quite make it all the way across his face. The edges of his eyelids were pink, but there were no tears. “We should go out, we should get a drink.”

“That’s a bad idea,” Steve said. “What about Pepper?”

“Pepper doesn’t like bars.” Stark turned the TV off. “Come on, I’m going out. You can stay in. But I’m going out.” He was already walking away, further into the lab, past the bits and pieces of half-finished projects. Past the robot holding a broom, resolutely sweeping nothing in a circle. “Good job Dum-E,” Stark said when he passed it, reached out and ran his hand across the machine. “Keep it up, buddy.”

“Stark!” Steve as he matched the hurried pace, “this is a really stupid idea. You’re just going to make it—”

“Please don’t finish that sentence,” Stark said, he stopped moving long enough to turn around. Long enough to establish eye contact. Long enough to say (without speaking): _I’m already a sitting duck, I’m already an easy target, I’m already as easy to kill as I can get._

Steve had an insider’s view of inevitability. He kept a mental record of all the targets that survived at the opposite end of Bucky’s latest assignment. Bucky was an expert, one of the best in the business, his record was as good as it got. There were zero survivors. Maybe the man Obadiah hired to take out Stark was just as good, just as patient, just as determined— It didn’t matter where they went.

Safety was an illusion at this point. So, Steve sighed, he nodded, and Stark smiled as bright as sunshine. “I knew you’d see it my way.”

\--

The bar was dim and loud. The kind of place that served burgers and played non-stop sports coverage. Stark had started them at the bar, ordering a few shots to get started. (To take the edge off, as if any liquor was good enough to make a man forget the sort of things Stark was trying to forget.) Steve had agreed to drink one.

“Come on,” Stark had said as he pushed the little shot glass toward him, “you’re built like a horse. Come on. I promise you’ll still be perfectly capable.” 

Alcohol, like caffeine, like _sleep_ was one of those things that didn’t affect Steve anymore. He gave in, but he protested first. (For the sake of it.) 

They were sharing a pitcher of beer, sitting in a booth, waiting on the arrival of their appetizer potato skins. Stark’s cheeks were blushing just enough to make his smile seem brighter. He was folding his napkin over and over, absently reducing it in size and increasing its width as he went. “Come on,” he said, “tell me about you. What sports did you play in high school?”

“None,” Steve said.

“Bullshit. Come on, I won’t judge you. So, you were a jock? Who among us hasn’t thought about stuffing a nerd in a locker? I won’t judge.” 

“I didn’t play sports in high school,” Steve repeated. “I had asthma—I had really bad asthma.”

Stark just stared at him; he leaned back into his side of the booth, flipping over the napkin he’d made a tall, tiny square. “Had?”

“I outgrew it.” Very suddenly, all at once, when he’d outgrown most things. Steve took a drink of the beer and was saved of any follow-up by the arrival of a pretty woman with a tight shirt and tighter jeans that served them a platter of potato skins and two warm plates. “Did you play sports in high school?”

“No. I was too young.”

(Too young?) Steve didn’t ask. Steve wanted to ask, but he didn’t ask. He just let that stay where it was, and decided on, “I was the kid that they pushed into lockers. I had this friend—he was bigger than me.” (Stark cocked up an eyebrow at that.) “Bigger than I was then. We’re about the same now. Everyone liked him, he was the kid that could have been on every team. He could have gotten into any crowd he wanted. But he was my friend instead.” (Because loyalty _mattered_.) “Anyway, I don’t like bullies.”

“You’re really annoying,” Stark said. “You’re just really fucking annoying.” But he was grinning when he said it, wiping his fingers on a fresh napkin. “It was bad enough to put up with you when you were just the most attractive man I’ve ever seen, and now you’ve got—childhood illness and a lifelong best friend. You took a bullet to save me and you hate bullies. I can’t stand you.”

“Sorry?”

“You do have faults?”

More than he was willing to mention casually. (Maybe some of them involving things like Natasha saying things like: take advantage of this man.) Steve shrugged to buy himself a breath, to think of something mundane and expected, something funny they could laugh about. “I’ve been told I’m boring.”

That made Stark’s smile get larger, he was grinning around a mouthful of potato and cheese (and bacon). “I don’t think you can qualify anyone who has been shot more than once as boring.”

“Maybe they meant that I’m not a riveting conversationalist.” He picked up one of his own appetizers with the full intention of taking a bite but he was interrupted by Stark’s voice (low as a hum) saying:

“Maybe they mean in bed.”

That, well that brought them back to a skinny old man with curious fingers, remarking to Ms. Potts how Mr. Stark did like a crunchy snack. Steve was working on being offended by the presumptiveness of that statement and running out of steam before he even got started. Because Stark was smiling at him, waiting for the lecture to start, and there was something _charming_ about that kind of cheekiness. “No,” Steve said, “that’s not what they meant.”

Stark could have pushed for more, but he reverted back to the start, saying, “so you didn’t play sports. What did you do for fun then?”

“I was an artist,” Steve said. 

\--

Stark said, “I really don’t need you to follow me to the bathroom,” and Steve didn’t even have to point out that he was definitely wrong about that. They were probably safe at the moment, probably just an anonymous set of guys in a bar that was slowly emptying of good intentions and filling up with noise and second rounds. The air had changed in all the time they’d been there, but nobody had recognized Stark.

At least, that was the assumption that Steve had fallen into. He still got up and followed Stark toward the bathroom, but they hadn’t made it very far. The bathroom was on the other side of a cluster of guys with dirty shirts and dust on their forearms, arguing about who was going to buy the next round. They were brash-and-loud, like an alarm siren sounding without end, but Stark still elbowed his way past without concern.

“Hey, watch out,” the man said.

Stark was many things, but he wasn’t tall. Wearing his T-shirt and his stretchy hoodie over it, he didn’t look like much of anything at all. (And his grin, his pink-cheeked grin, that just asked someone to punch him in the face.) “For?” Stark asked.

“You didn’t see me standing here? You didn’t see me and my friends,” the man twisted to motion at his buddies.

“It’s hard to miss you,” Stark said.

That was a confounding answer. The man jerked his head back, and one of his buddies coughed a laugh. In a different place, where nothing had to escalate, they would have parted ways. The stranger would have resumed talking about job site complaints, his buddies would have agreed that Stark was a dick. Except:

“Just keep going,” Steve said in time with:

Stark staring down the first man with absolutely no sense of self-preservation. He was staring, unblinking, striving to meet and overcome the challenge issued by a stranger who couldn’t afford to be made a fool of in front of his buddies. The longer he stared, the harder a peaceful resolution was going to be. 

“Are we going to have a problem?” the man asked.

(Yes.) 

“You’re the one that started this,” Stark said. “I was walking, you were the one that stopped me—I know I’m good looking but—”

“Excuse me?”

“I have to say this is coming on too strong. Not that you’re not a good-looking man but—”

The friends still at the table were snickering. “I didn’t stop you because I thought you were good loo— You shoved past me and my friends, you made me spill my beer.”

Stark’s face was an insult that couldn’t be conveyed in words. The acceptance of realizing you were speaking to someone so basically incapable of intelligent thought that you had to reword everything you were trying to say. He nodded with great exaggeration. “I gotta say, I’m finding that kind of hard to believe. We’ve been standing here, at least fifteen, maybe twenty? Thirty? Seconds staring into each other’s eyes. I was getting a vibe, a kind of a looking for a slightly older man to teach you all the—”

“I’m not gay!”

Steve put a hand on Stark’s arm, to shove him sideways or just away, but the man leaned back against the push with that stupid smile on his face. “Move it, Stark,” he hissed.

And one of the guys at the table slapped his whole palm against the top of it, he shouted, “That’s who he looks like!” Because there had been a murmur of ideas passed around the table. “Tony Stark, the terrorist.”

“I’m not a terrorist,” Stark snapped. 

Well. 

“My brother got killed,” the second man said, “over there in that hellhole. Did you sell the bomb that killed him? Huh?” It was over the exact moment that man reached out to shove both his hands against Stark’s chest. It knocked Stark back two steps, didn’t throw him down. There were six best friends at that table, and every single one of them was getting to their feet. Not a rational mind among the lot of them. 

“Stop,” Steve said. He put himself between their fists and Stark’s body. “I think it would just be best if—”

Best would have been leaving when leaving was good. It was ten minutes ago when the worst thing that had happened while they were here was how endearing Stark’s grin got when you’d spent too long about him. Best had walked out the door to make way for violence. Not decent, worthwhile violence, but violence for the sake of pride. 

Steve got punched in the face and the only decent thing about it was how he heard the bone in the asshole’s hand crack, how the man shrieked when he landed the blow, and how he drew back to clutch his injured hand. “I wish you hadn’t,” Steve said. He had one hand on Stark’s arm (as the man gasped in surprise behind him) so he didn’t lose track of the man in the ensuing commotion.

Four of the idiots were still on the other side of the high, round table, so Steve kicked it as hard as he thought was appropriate. It skidded backward and took half the morons with them. That left the First Guy and Broken Hand to stare at him with some surprise. “You’re protecting that child-killer?” First Guy demanded.

Well, nobody would be more surprised about that than Steve himself. 

A cluster of morons was going to become a mob if someone didn’t deescalate the scene, but there was Steve Rogers saying, “what can I say? He’s cuter than you.” 

Stark laughed behind him, twisted his arm free from Steve’s grasp and leaned in against his back to say, “I can fight.” That was as far from an ideal resolution as they could get, but the only man who seemed willing to back away was the one with the broken hand.

“Out!” was an employee with a phone in their hand, “get out! I’ve called the cops, get out!” 

Six idiots with injured pride weren’t going to be so easily swayed, but Steve had no interest in being there when the cops showed up. He grabbed Stark by the arm before he could set off a second wave of aggression and yanked him sideways toward the door. 

Oh, and they were so close they almost made it. They were so close Steve could see the fading sunlight through the door as an entering customer pulled it open. But there was a great swell of catcalls and crude laughter behind him. The rising tide of stupid men shouting things like: 

“Pussy.” And, “you better take your girlfriend home, I would have whupped his ass,” and well, things that were too crude to repeat. Steve stopped with Stark two steps behind him, being reluctantly dragged. He stopped just short of a startled waitress with an empty tray, and a perfectly places mirror that let Steve look himself dead in the eyes.

_Walk away_ , said every logical part of his entire body in a perfect echo of Bucky’s voice. But Steve’s hand unclenched from Stark’s arm and he took the empty tray from the startled waitress as he turned around. It had a nice weight to it, a good, even distribution so that when he threw it, it sailed through the air, and it landed right where he’d hoped.

Right in the first man’s gaping jaws, right when he was turning to shout something else that shouldn’t be said of anyone. It struck him with enough force to knock him backward, and Steve slid around two chairs, a table and the employee with the phone to get back to the remaining four idiots.

Four idiots that were watching the blood pour out of Loud Mouth’s mouth. Four idiots that were glancing at Broken Hand’s swelling knuckles. Four idiots that were suddenly faced with the realization that they should have shut up when they had a chance. Four idiots electing a leader by sliding behind the tallest man with the widest palms that threw both hands up in surrender, 

“Hey man,” he said, “we were just— Things just got out of hand. I think we should just—”

Stark was back, threading his fingers through Steve’s just to make him loosen his fist and he said, “let’s go I can hear the sirens.” He tugged and Steve gave. When they walked away this time, not one single man in the bar made a noise until they were gone.

\--

There was a round of congratulation drinks back at the house, Stark was red-faced and laughing. “I thought I had you figured out,” he said while he was bare-foot and half drunk in the kitchen. “I thought you were boring, Rogers. I really did. I thought you were one of those uptight suburban house dad types. The ones that argued at return counters about ten cent price differences and submitted requests to the library to have Harry Potter taken out of circulation but you— You surprise me.”

Most of that sounded offensive, but Steve was pretending to be drunk while Stark was just drunk enough to find it believable. “Really?” he said, “you don’t surprise me at all. What were you thinking—those men would have killed you.”

“I can take a man in a fair fight,” Stark said. He sputtered a disbelieving noise, all bluster and noise. 

“Six against one isn’t a fair fight.” (That wasn’t true, it really depended on the six, and the one.) “You’re smart enough to build all this,” he motioned around the too-smart kitchen, “but you’re not smart enough to know when it’s a good idea to keep your mouth shut?”

Stark laughed. Stark laughed without shame, like all the stress, fear and anxiety that had been haunting him the whole of the day was long-long-fingers catching him in all the ticklish places. He was bright with laughter, rubbed red from liquor and bad choices, so his voice was hoarse when he said, “nobody ever accused me of knowing when to keep my mouth shut.” 

They were too close, close enough that Stark’s hand had found it’s way to rest on his chest, that they were sharing a look. That look that sank down into your gut, that warmed you up to bad ideas, that made everything you shouldn’t-wouldn’t-couldn’t do suddenly seem like real life possibilities. 

Steve’s hand had a mind of its own, finding a nice resting place on Stark’s waist. The pads of his fingers catching on the soft, stretchy T-shirt material and pulling it out of shape, so half his fingers were on cotton and half were on skin. Their breathing was an uncertain soundtrack to the moment, a nice steady addition to the thundering crescendo of his heartbeat strumming hotter and higher. Stark’s body was a perfect against his, stepping forward to narrow the gap, his eyelashes were perfectly long, perfectly framing his half-open eyes. 

There was his grin, his stupid, stupid, charming smile. “What else am I going to find out about you, Rogers?”

Oh, well— “Nothing while you’re drunk,” Steve said when the space between their mouths could be measured in millimeters. When his tongue was filling up with the taste of Stark’s breath. (When he could have done anything he wanted, and there were a lot of things he did want just then, but none of them he wanted with this level of alcohol involved.) Instead he stepped sideways, slid his hand from Stark’s waist to around his back. “Let’s find you a bed.”

“Prude,” Stark mumbled, but he didn’t object as Steve took him down to the lab. His fingers were sloppy and slow about punching in the code, and he collapsed as soon as Steve laid him on the couch.


	7. Chapter 7

Steve had a type. He’d discovered that in second grade, when he was two steps short of making it to the nurse’s office (alive) thinking it was really a shame that the teacher hadn’t been more concerned about things like Steve telling her he couldn’t breathe. Oh well, it was too late those last two steps would have taken him too long—and then,

Then there was Bucky, scooping Steve off the ground as if they had any reason to know each other. Bucky was from a different classroom, from a different group of boys, from exactly the same neighborhood as him. “I saw what those kids did to you,” Bucky said. “Don’t worry. I took care of it.” He dragged Steve forward, around a corner, and to the nurse that spoke in constant exclamations. 

Bucky had always been it for Steve Rogers. Steve had not always been it for Bucky; or maybe he hadn’t ever been it for Bucky. Sometimes it felt like they were dancing around that realization, sometimes it felt like they were so close to tumbling over into making a real go of it that all they needed was a bit of a slippery slope.

Maybe they needed some liquor, like Stark had. Maybe they needed a bar fight and red-hot-smiles. 

Steve couldn’t lay claim to being a smart man, but he had enough experience to know (now) that the only time Bucky was ever interested was when he thought his claim was being challenged. Because Bucky had been snotty and rude about Peggy Carter, because Bucky had rolled his eyes at her every time she spoke, and it wasn’t because he didn’t like her. No, it was because Steve did. Because there was just enough time during the catastrophe for her to ask him to dance, and not quite enough time for him to take her up on that invitation.

Bucky would hate Tony. He’d hate on principle; he’d hate him beyond reason. Because Steve Rogers was sitting on a cot outside of a locked lab door, feeling a great swell of regret that he couldn’t get drunk. Steve didn’t have the benefit of an excuse, and he couldn’t live with following through on drunken whisperings while he was sober. 

(Steve was thinking, stupidly, that if Stark, if _Tony_ woke up and he leaned that close again, if he batted his eyelashes and made his suggestions that Steve wasn’t going to say no twice.)

That was the kind of thought that could keep a man awake all night. (Well, that one, and the other ones, the ones about what sort of things a man like Stark enjoyed. About how exactly he liked to enjoy his crunchy snacks.)

\--

Steve was still awake, staring at the ceiling, resolving to remain professional, when his phone rang. The experiments had given him a lot of things, but they hadn’t given him the ability to see the future. Still, he lifted the phone to his face without checking the name. “Hello Natasha, I thought you had started sleeping.”

“I would be sleeping, Steve. Except I just read a news article about an alleged bar fight involving Tony Stark and an unknown man that tossed a serving tray like a frisbee.” (Steve liked to imagine that wherever Nat was, she was wearing her pajamas. Maybe she had some fuzzy slippers on her feet. Maybe her hair was up in a messy ponytail and she was wearing a cleansing face mask.) “I need to know your head is clear on this.”

“Stark didn’t want to stay in the house.”

“You’re bigger than him. Make him stay.”

Steve was bigger, sure, and stronger and faster but he wasn’t smarter. He didn’t know the layout the way Stark did. (Nobody did, apparently, since even the blue prints that Natasha had didn’t account for how Stark appeared in rooms that shouldn’t have been accessible from his last known location.) “He would have gone with or without me. I’d like to get paid, so I went with him.”

The silence was profoundly deafening. 

“I’m clear on this, Nat,” he said.

“I did some digging on the assassin hired to take out Stark, Steve. I don’t have a name yet.” (There was a lie in those words but there was no telling which ones were true and which ones weren’t with Natasha.) “But I’ve heard about his reputation. This man isn’t going to hesitate to kill Stark. You got lucky at the Fireman’s Ball, and you aren’t going to get lucky twice. I don’t care if Stark blows you and buys you a new Mercedes, do not let him leave that house unless it’s life or death.”

Steve looked sideways toward the lab door. The words were like a bucket of ice water on his silly daydreaming. (Almost, not quite.) He sat up while Natasha ranted, so his feet were planted flat on the floor whenever she came to a stop. “Stark isn’t going to listen to me.”

“Make him listen,” Natasha said. “If you can’t figure out how to do it to make your job easier, do it for Bucky. Remember you took this job so you can get Bucky out. Keep Stark alive, keep him in that house.”

“Fine,” Steve said. He didn’t wait for Natasha to finish her thought, he just ended the call with a slide of his thumb on the screen. 

\--

Stark shuffled out of the lab the next morning, rubbing his eyes like a toddler, with his hair in a great fluffy nest of knots. He squinted at Steve leaning back against the wall behind the cot, caught up in something between a hangover and genuine distaste before he mumbled, “you could have at least let me get a shower before we had to deal with this.”

“This?” Steve repeated.

Stark dropped his hand down by his side, looking as much like a regretful frat boy as he did like a billionaire and a genius. His jeans were even a quarter inch too long, dragging after his heels on the ground as he reached blindly behind him to pull the lab door shut. “I don’t like this new petty side that you’re showing.”

Steve got to his feet, but there was hardly enough space between them for him to manage it. No, it was his head ducked low (why) and Stark’s head tipped back and the two of them daring the other to be the first one to say something. _This_ could have been qualified as anything, but once they brought it back up, well— “I’m doing my job,” Steve assured him. “I’m your body guard. It’s hard to do that when your body is somewhere I’m not.”

Stark’s lips quirked up at that, he was on the verge of revisiting yesterday’s proposal when JARVIS announced: “Ms. Potts has arrived, sir.” Instead of whispering ill-advised invitations to his bed, Stark groaned. “Stall her won’t you, JARVIS?”

“I’m afraid she is already opening the front door, sir.”

Stark shook his head, “it’s so hard to find reliable help these days.” He abandoned the unnecessarily narrow space between them to jog up the steps with more dexterity than Steve would have expected. At the top, he was calling out, “Pepper! I thought you were working the office today—”

“Well I would have been, Tony,” Pepper assured him in time with the quick-snap-clap of her heels against the floor. “However, I got a phone call from your lawyer last night alleging that you were involved a bar fight? And you,” she turned to look at Steve as if they were friends enough to be arguing with such ferocity, “you broke a man’s jaw.”

(Then that man was very lucky. Steve had done a lot worse in the past.) 

“Look,” Tony said. “I think what’s important is that Steve did the job he was hired to do. I was afraid for my life.”

Pepper crossed her arms. Standing in heels she was inches taller than Tony, and the height was a tactical advantage to convey her _constant_ disapproval. “You wouldn’t have been afraid for your life if he’d stayed in the house. You’re treating this like you treat everything, like it’s funny. This isn’t _funny_ , Steve’s already been shot. _Shot_ , Tony. That means that this is _serious_.”

“You think I’m not aware that it’s—”

“I think—” Pepper stopped for a moment, looked at Steve and clenched her jaw so that when she did speak, she said, “you could take it more seriously.” 

“Its my life that’s in danger, Pepper.”

“No,” (even if it was), “it’s not just _you_. If Obadiah thinks you’re the only thing standing in his way, what is he going to do if you’re not there?”

Stark straightened out of his apathetic slouch. He shut down, he dropped the pretense of comfort and cajoling. “I’m doing what I can to make sure that it never comes to that.” The words were a wall, and Pepper matched the iciness with her own resolute stare.

They became like two statutes, staring at one another without speaking a single word out loud. 

“We’ll stay in,” Steve said after sixteen seconds of unbearable silence.

Pepper flicked her stare sideways to him, just long enough to see him, and then back at Stark’s face. “I know you, I know how you are when there’s accessible distractions. This isn’t an award ceremony you don’t want to attend to. It isn’t a board meeting you keep pushing back. It’s not a commencement speech. This is about people’s lives. Yours, and who knows how many others if Obadiah gets what he wants.”

“Is that all, Ms. Potts?”

“If that’s all for you, Mr. Stark.”

(And Steve had not heard such perfectly concise or polite fuck yous in all his life.) As soon as the door was closed behind Pepper on her way out, Stark was rubbing his face with his hand, mumbling, “I’m going to take a shower.”

\--

Stark returned wearing a clean shirt and a nice pair of jeans, no socks with his hair in still-damp-soft-curls. He didn’t get too close, but stood three-feet-away with one hand idly resting on the counter top and the other motioning in the air between them. “Some things were said,” he offered.

Steve was pouring the smoothie he’d made into a cup, nodding to agree that things had been said.

“Implications were made.”

“Were they implications?” Steve had never had the opportunity to stand in the mirror and practice how to make himself more attractive. (Oh, but Bucky had, living with Bucky for six months before he’d enlisted had been non-stop torture.) He wasn’t practiced in knowing when he was more or less attractive but there must have been something worth taking note of if the way Stark’s gaze slid down his body was anything to judge by. (And all Steve did was lean against the counter. Imagine if he did try.) “They seemed like offers.”

“Offers require more direct language.”

Steve took a small drink of his smoothie, licked it off his mouth and shrugged his shoulders. “Implications were made,” he agreed.

“I was inebriated.” Stark touched his chest. “You were—I don’t know if you can get drunk. I assume your metabolism has to be scientifically impossible to maintain a body like that. Not that I’ve spent a lot of time looking at your body. It’s just that your shirt is very tight.” 

This particular shirt was so tight it seemed as if it were always in danger of being ripped to shreds if he moved too quickly. “Was there a point?”

“Obviously.” (Obviously enough that they still had to point it out.) “As your employer, I did not mean to make imply that you are obligated to accept any unwanted sexual advances as a condition of your employment. And I would like to apologize if my actions made you uncomfortable in anyway.” (More uncomfortable than how Stark had said most of this to his biceps rather than his face.) 

“Ok.”

Stark floundered. He narrowed his eyes, he pulled his hand off the counter and he assessed the situation before him. After a pause, he shifted on his feet, stopped fighting the urge to look Steve over with obvious sexual interest and stood there just steeping the room in unspoken invitations to see where this might go. He said, “did I make you uncomfortable?”

“Did you want to?”

“No.”

Steve set the cup down on the counter, he leaned way from the counter, rocking to stand at his full height. “You were drunk, you’re in a bad place. I get the impression you would have come onto anyone that was standing close enough for you to get your hands on. I wasn’t uncomfortable, but I think it’s a bad idea.”

Stark crossed his arms over his chest and sighed. “All you have to do is say you don’t want me, Rogers. I’m a big boy and I can take it.”

(I don’t want you, four-little-words, and the easiest lie that Steve would ever have said right out loud. I have to protect my friend was closer to the truth. I’m too close to something to give up now, seemed appropriate. But none of them were making it from his head to his throat.) “Don’t put words into my mouth,” is what he said. “Maybe I just prefer to be propositioned by sober men.”

Stark smiled at that, “I hate a man with standards,” he said.

Steve shrugged. “Pretty low standard, I think.”

“I’m going to my lab,” Stark said out of order of where the conversation was going. “Before Pepper’s Tony-Senses start tingling and she comes back to yell at me about this. But,” he hadn’t even attempted to move yet, “so we’re clear, you do not feel unfairly pressured into flirtation and any possible outcome of said flirtation?”

“I do not.” It felt like the end of a conversation, that was why Steve took another drink. Stark should have turned around and walked away. 

“And of course,” Stark added, “I don’t feel like your performance as my body guard is dependent on me putting out either.” 

The drink was a mistake, snorted upward, he ended up doubled over the sink coughing smoothie into the smooth stainless-steel basin. His nose was on fire with sudden unwanted intrusion. His voice was raw and hoarse, gasping, “what?”

“That was incredibly attractive,” Stark said.

Steve turned the water on to rinse the sink as he straightened up again to stare at Stark standing there looking as innocent as a guilty man was capable of. “You think I’d let someone kill you because you came onto me while you were drunk?” 

“No, I don’t think that. That’s what I just said.”

“That’s _inhuman_ ,” Steve said. He turned the water back off and the whole kitchen went perfectly quiet. His words hung in the air, doing a poor job of matching up the way that Stark was looking at him. Steve didn’t have a lot of experience with seduction but he had more than any man should have being the subject of _scientific curiosity_ and that was how Stark was looking at him now. “Concentrate, Stark, my eyes are up here.”

“You have nice eyes too,” Stark said by rote. “How’s your arm? Have you been changing the bandages.”

(Oh yes. Steve had changed them just last night by ripping them off and deciding not to bother with covering it up again. It was just he’d forgotten that bullet wounds took longer to heal and this shirt was tight enough to rip if he flexed too hard.) “Yeah, I’m just letting it breath a little,” Steve said. “It’s good for it. Helps prevent infection.”

“Right,” Stark said. “I’m going to the lab.”

“Good, good,” Steve said.

This time Stark did turn to walk away, he even made a few steps before he said, “nice ass, by the way.” He didn’t linger to hear a response, he didn’t look over his shoulder to see how Steve liked hearing that, he just kept going.

And that—well. That shouldn’t have been attractive.

\--

Space gave him time to think. Space and time helped Steve remember that no matter how momentarily charming Tony Stark _could_ be, the basic facts remained unchanged:

1\. Steve had been hired to do a job.   
2\. Tony Stark had made his fortune by continuing his father’s work. He’d profited from warfare and Steve had seen up-close the devastation the product of Stark’s life’s work.  
3\. He was doing this for Bucky.

For _Bucky_. Because Bucky deserved better, because Bucky needed a way _out_. He needed a farm house on a plot of land and just enough money to get buy. He needed the monotony of hard labor and the anonymity of a new identity that wasn’t dependent on their present skills. Bucky needed a _chance_ , just one of any of the number of chances that had been stolen from him.

Steve could remember that, like the trunk in their carefully stocked closets, when there was nothing else to think about. Steve could remember there was a persistent enemy chasing behind them when he was walking the perimeter. 

Do the _job_. Remember this momentary life you’d made for yourself was an illusion. 

Steve couldn’t stand still, he could lean his elbows against the railing, he couldn’t watch the water beat against the cliffside. He could feel the heat of the sun, the briskness of the wind blowing the smell of hot rock and cool water into his face. Steve didn’t have the luxury of misbehaving; he didn’t benefit from getting attached.

Steve wasn’t free to make or accept propositions. Steve was a fugitive and a war criminal. Steve was a man with blood on his hands. Steve belonged in a dusty apartment, living by the rules of mutually assured destruction, stealing sofas from empty apartments and keeping track of who had and hadn’t gotten arrested lately.

Steve didn’t belong in Tony Stark’s life. 

_For Bucky_ , he kept thinking to himself. He could string Stark along, he could make him believe there was some chance there that there wasn’t. He could protect the man, he could take a bullet, or a knife, and he could wring sympathy and attraction from a man who had already shown interest.

For _Bucky_.

Steve had already proven was willing to do anything to protect his friend. He could do this too.

\--

Exercise was essential. It was also just something to do. In the whole of Stark’s house, there was no danger. There was nothing to protect against. There were no exits that required additional security, no blind corners, no probable points of entry. In the bright light of day, there was _nothing_ else to do. So, Steve did pushups.

He had just finished sit ups.

He was going to move onto—

“Now that’s just unfair,” Stark said. He was standing somewhere to the left, and behind, probably getting a very good view of what Steve looked like stretched out in mid-push-up. The shirt that had been too tight before was now damp and held tight to his skin. (He had heard, from Bucky, who liked to mention it without the intent to follow through, that Steve’s back could attract even the straightest of men like helpless little bees drawn to the smell of something sweet.) “I’m trying to be good. Think of the lawsuits, Rogers. We have to think of the lawsuits.”

Steve turned his body so he could look back at Stark, didn’t stop doing push-ups, just shifted his weight so it was balanced on his one hand on the floor. Attraction had always felt, to Steve, very much like a challenge. Peggy had looked at him with naked aggression, all of her intentions to take him dancing (and to her bed, he assumed) had been flavored with violence. Her attraction not him had pissed her off, it had been an inconvenience in their circumstance. 

Bucky was the same, always teetering right on the edge of doing something about the static-filled-silence between them. They had shared a bed, and a shower, and clothes and hairbrushes and— Bucky had the look of a man in a cage, rattling the bars at dinner time, always getting a crust of bread when there was a feast in the next room. Steve was a willing feast, but Bucky stayed in his metaphorical cage, with his tongue dragging across his dry lips, making plans for what he’d do one day. 

Stark didn’t look at him like a challenge. He looked at him with softness, with fondness, the way someone might look at art. As if there was poetry in Stark’s head, and if given the opportunity he’d light some candles and he’d throw around a handful of rose petals.

“Is there a lot of money in lawsuits?” Steve asked.

Stark was carrying an empty cup, pressed against his chest absently, and he smiled at the question. “I wouldn’t know,” he said, “I’ve never been successfully sued for sexual harassment. Pepper is the only employee I interact with on a daily basis and,” he shrugged, looked for somewhere to sit and pulled up an ottoman that was stable enough to sit, “you’ve seen her. She’s beautiful. But I get this praying mantis feel from her.”

Steve rolled to the side, so he was sitting too. There was sweat on his face, and his arms and his back. He was looking right at Stark’s stupid face when the man made a mockery of disappointment. “Ms. Potts seems very nice,” he said.

Stark laughed, just a chuckle, sat up straighter. His hand was gripping his thigh through his jeans. His knees were wide enough that a bolder man (not Steve, but someone with the right experience to read the signs) might have assumed they were being invited into the space between them. But Stark just ran his tongue across his pink smiling lips, saying something like: “Pepper is many things. I wouldn’t necessarily classify her as _nice_. But what would you know? You got shot three days ago and you’re doing push-ups. You clearly have no concept of pain.”

“It’s not so bad,” Steve assured him. (One might say, it was almost fully healed.) “It hurts more when you don’t use it.”

Stark had never looked less convinced about anything in all of his life, but he was willing to accept it at face value. “Well, don’t let me stop you. I just came up for ice.” He didn’t move, and Steve didn’t move, so they were just sitting there, staring at one another, letting the moment grow more-and-more tense. 

“I was finished,” Steve said.

“My loss.” Stark even sighed as he got to his feet. “I’ll just have to roll the tape back and watch the show from the start.”

“You could meet me in the gym in the morning, watch it in real time.” (This was the trouble with have no notion of how to flirt with men who found him attractive, it left him saying stupid things like let’s lift weights when he wanted to say something like, let’s make out.) 

“Lawsuits,” Stark whispered to himself, or to Steve, or just to say that he had. “Sure,” was how he followed it up, “I could use a good work out.”

(Oh hell, there was Steve Rogers, the man who could convince himself to do anything for a friend, forgetting all about all his resolutions, thinking about nothing but how Tony Stark would look in the morning with bedhead and a workout shirt, sweating in time with Steve. Maybe just the bedhead, maybe just the sweat, maybe not the shirt, maybe without any weight lifting, maybe just what Tony Stark would look like flat on his gym floor, how his work-rough-hands must feel when they touched you—

How it must feel to have a man used to precision work touching you to start with.

And well.

And—)

“Yeah,” Steve agreed, “me too. Tomorrow? Seven AM?”

(Or now. Right _now_. Right _now_ , right _here_.)

“I’ll be there,” Stark said, and he left, probably reminding himself about lawsuits as he went.


End file.
